Research Spotlight

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Applying a psychoanalytic lens to Development Studies

Ilan Kapoor is a professor of Critical Development Studies, a postcolonial scholar, and one of the first to bring both psychoanalysis and postcoloniality to the field of Development Studies. He first came to prominence in the early 2000s through a series of journal articles on participatory development, that is, the practice of involving beneficiaries of […]

Engaging communities in the transition to low-carbon economy

How citizens and communities participate in energy initiatives is critical to the successful transition to a low-carbon economy. Meaningful participation in renewable and low-carbon energy initiatives is linked with enhanced citizen support. Community energy -- characterized by high levels of participation --  is also associated with wide ranging benefits for communities such as new social mechanisms for […]

The pandemic and the need for a new society

During the on-going pandemic, humanity’s suffering has increased enormously. To date, 35 million people in the world have contracted the coronavirus, and more than 1 million have died. In the richest and most powerful country in the world, more than 7 million cases have been reported, with more than 200,000 deaths. While the more affluent […]

As meat plants shut down, COVID-19 reveals the extreme concentration of our food supply

Ian Mosby and Sarah Rotz, Special to the Globe and Mail, published April 29, 2020 “The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson Foods Chairman John H. Tyson wrote in an open letter published in the New York Times earlier this week. And he’s not wrong. Over the past month, anyone following the news might have […]

Reduce, reuse and rethink: Re-defining our goals for a waste management system

For the first time in my career, issues surrounding waste management have now become part of mainstream discussion. Whether it be my neighbors asking me “Can this really be recycled?” to growing concerns surrounding single use plastics, people (both the public and policy makers alike), care now more than ever regarding what is happening to […]

Exploring democracy and justice within low-carbon energy initiatives

Susan Morrissey Wyse began her PhD in 2019 with the Faculty of Environmental Studies (now Environmental and Urban Change). The focus of her PhD dissertation is on the social impacts of low-carbon energy initiatives. The aim of her research is to investigate the intersection of democracy and justice within low carbon and renewable energy transitions. […]

Urban life in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic

In an article in The Conversation on February 17, Professors Roger Keil, Creighton Connolly, and S. Harris Ali, stressed that “[o]utbreaks like coronavirus start in and spread from the edges of cities,” noting that merging infectious disease has much to do with how and where we live, and that the ongoing coronavirus is an example of the close […]

Vaccine geopolitics during COVID-19

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus illustrates that we are connected globally like never before, yet responses to the virus are decidedly local and national, exposing new geopolitical fault lines and exacerbating material divides that make the difference between living and dying.   To put it bluntly, “we are simply not all in this […]

Traversing Toronto in pandemic times

From mid-March to late May, Professor Stefan Kipfer posted a series of short articles and photo essays on social media. Inspired by his daily walks and bicycle trips around Toronto, the images tried to make sense of the news about the coronavirus that started in December 2019 in Wuhan, China and became widespread around the world. In […]