Isaac Thornley

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Human Geography and a Course Instructor in the Department of Geography and Planning. My postdoctoral research examines Canada's emerging electric vehicle (EV) battery supply chain, drawing on political ecology and energy humanities approaches. This work builds upon my doctoral research on Canadian pipeline politics (specifically, the Trans Mountain Expansion project), where I employed psychoanalytic ideology critique to analyze how state and corporate actors attempted to secure social license for the pipeline. I am broadly interested in the political and ideological dynamics of the unfolding energy transition.

I recently co-authored a report, "Greenwashing the Ring of Fire: Indigenous Jurisdiction and Gaps in the EV Battery Supply Chain," as part of the Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism project. My work has been published in the journals Canadian Literature and English Studies in Canada. My article, "Cracks, Gaps, and Oil Spills in the Settler-Colonial Symbolic Order: Confronting Socio-Ecological Antagonism in Canada," received the Honourable Mention for the 2024 F.E.L. Priestley Prize awarded by the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). Beyond academia, I have worked with multiple organizations (such as CUPE 3903 and Social Planning Toronto) advocating for better wages and working conditions, affordable housing, and improved public transit and infrastructure.

Publications

Desai, Saima and Isaac Thornley. “Greenwashing the Ring of Fire: Indigenous Jurisdiction and the Gaps in the EV Battery Supply Chain.” Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism. February 2024, https://jurisdiction-infrastructure.com/research/greenwashing-the-ring-o....

Thornley, Isaac. “The Settler-Colonial Jouissance of Western Alienation: Mapping the Ideological Terrain of Canadian Pipeline Politics.” Canadian Literature, 253 (2023): 120-147. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377206228_The_Settler-Colonial_...

Thornley, Isaac. “Cracks, Gaps, and Oil Spills in the Settler-Colonial Symbolic Order: Confronting Socio-Ecological Antagonism in Canada.” English Studies in Canada (ESC), 47, no. 2-3 (2021): 9-35. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377152154_Cracks_Gaps_and_Oil_S...

Websites

The website of the Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism (IBE) project: https://jurisdiction-infrastructure.com/

The IBE project is a SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant housed at York University that aims to develop an agenda for fundamentally re-making socio-technical systems for an anti-colonial and radically-just transition. It is about conceptualizing and building infrastructure that restores and revitalizes Indigenous territorial governing authority or “jurisdiction.”

For the past three years I have worked as a Research Assistant on the project. I created the project website and I recently co-authored a report (along with Saima Desai) titled "Greenwashing the Ring of Fire: Indigenous Jurisdiction and Gaps in the EV Battery Supply Chain."