Christian Abizaid

Research Interests

• Environment and development
• Indigenous and peasant livelihoods and resource use in Latin America
• Vulnerability and resilience
• Rural poverty
• Forest and biodiversity conservation
• Social networks
• Neotropical forests; mainly Amazonia and Mexico

Naomi Adiv

Research Interests

• – urban public space
• – community development
• – the social life of water (swimming, bathing, toilets)

Alana Boland

Research Interests

• Environment and development
• Sustainability and urban political economy
• China (1950s to present)
• Water governance

Don Boyes

Research Interests

• Geographic information systems (GIS)
• Teaching with technology, online and blended/hybrid learning
• Information technology in higher education

Jing Chen

Research Interests

• Remote sensing
• Geographical Information Systems
• Biogeochemical Cycle Modelling
• Hydrology
• Micrometeorology

Deborah Cowen

Research Interests

• Contested spaces
• Geographies of citizenship and labour
• Militarism, violence, and security
• Cities and social justice
• Sub/urban politics

Michelle Daigle

Research Interests

• Indigenous geographies and ecologies
• Settler colonialism
• Indigenous resurgence
• Decolonial geographies
• Geographies of resource extraction
• Indigenous feminism
• Indigenous food sovereignty
• Indigenous water governance

I am Mushkegowuk (Cree), a member of Constance Lake First Nation in Treaty 9, and of French ancestry. Broadly, my research examines colonial capitalist dispossession and violence on Indigenous lands and bodies, as well as Indigenous practices of resurgence and freedom. My current research project is on environmental (in)justice in Mushkegowuk territory. Over the past several years, I have also collaborated with Dr. Magie Ramirez, in an effort to build grounded theorizations of decolonial geographies.

Joseph Desloges

Research Interests

• Holocene fluvial and glacial landscape reconstruction using sedimentary archives
• Reconstruction of extreme events
• Urbanization impacts on stream erosion
• River geoarchaeology

The influence of rivers, glaciers and humans on landform development in the northern hemisphere, mainly in the mountain areas of Canada, Greenland and Iceland with emphasis on B.C., the southern Yukon and southern Ontario.

My special interests are the influence of climate change and human disturbance on geomorphic processes and landform change with an emphasis on river floodplains and sediment yield in glacierized landscapes. Contemporary and Holocene glacier fluctuations have been reconstructed using terrestrial and high-resolution glaciolacustrine and glaciomarine sedimentary archives. I have conducted research mainly in large glacier-fed lakes of the western Canadian Cordillera and, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, deep fiords of western Greenland. More recent work has focussed on late Quaternary and Holocene fluvial environments of southern Ontario with particular emphasis on decoupling the influence of humans disturbance on erosion from that associated with climate-induced changes. Geophysical, geochronology and geoarchaeology methods have been used extensively to develop and interpret the sedimentary record.

Richard DiFrancesco

Research Interests

• The functioning and evolution of regional economic clusters
• The policy implications of cluster evolution in the face of changing trade environments
• Interests also overlap heavily with the field of urban dynamics insofar as the evolution of economic clusters is most clearly felt at the urban scale

Heather Dorries

Research Interests

• Indigenous planning
• Indigenous knowledge
• Settle colonial urbanism
• Planning history and theory

Matthew Farish

Research Interests

• Militarism, geopolitics, and geographical knowledge
• The global Cold War
• Environmental history
• Urban culture

Meric Gertler

Research Interests

• Cities as sites of innovation and creativity
• Role of universities and research organizations in urban economies
• Regional and national systems of innovation
• Institutions, technological and industrial change in geographical context

Emily Gilbert

Research Interests

• Citizenship, borders and security
• Nationalism, postcolonialism, globalization
• The culture and politics of money
• Social and political theory
• North America

My current research revolves around issues related to citizenship, borders, security, economy, nation-states and globalization. I am particularly interested in the ways that North American geopolitical relations are being reshaped, and how the idea of risk—both economic and social—has been used to discipline behaviour and promote new forms of citizenship. This work also considers the securitization of the region, with a focus on changing border practices and policies. Another aspect of my research addresses the social, cultural and political dimensions of money, from the cultural values inscribed on national currencies, to the proposals for a North American Monetary Union, to general theories of money and exchange. While much of the above work interrogates the concept of the nation-state, I also continue to be fascinated by visual and literary representations, and have examined urban and wilderness narratives with a special emphasis on Canadian national identity and belonging.

Kanishka Goonewardena

Research Interests

• Critical theory and Marxist philosophy
• Architecture and urban planning
• Colonialism, imperialism, nationalism
• South Asia (Sri Lanka)

Jason Hackworth

Research Interests

• Urban political economy
• Comparative urban policy
• Ethno-racial conflict

Danny Harvey

Research Interests

• Energy efficiency potential and costs
• Renewable energy potential and costs
• Global energy system decarbonization scenarios

Paul Hess

Research Interests

• Pedestrian environments and design
• Planning for active transport modes
• Streets as public space
• Transport and equity
• Suburban form and development
• Planning history
• Planning systems, development control and urban form

Deborah Leslie

Research Interests

• Cultural industries
• Commodity chains
• Material culture
• Urban economic development
• Economic geography
• Feminist geography

Robert Lewis

Research Interests

• Historical geography of North American economic restructuring
• Industrial and social geography of suburban Chicago, 1850-1950
• Wartime manufacturing and metropolitan growth
• Colonial urban India and social exclusion

Jane Liu

Research Interests

• Atmospheric environment (pollution transport and emission from fires, air quality and health implications, satellite monitoring, modeling)
• Tropospheric and stratospheric ozone
• Climate change
• Atmosphere-biosphere interactions (carbon, water, and energy cycles, land surface schemes, biogenic emissions)
• Remote sensing of atmosphere and land
• Ecological modeling

Virginia Maclaren

Research Interests

• Waste management
• Sustainability indicators
• Environmental assessment
• South East Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), China

Web Links

• Waste-Econ: Making Waste Work for the Economy

Sarah Peirce

Research Interests

• Physical geography
• Fluvial geomorphology
• Field methods
• Environmental monitoring

Scott Prudham

Research Interests

• Political ecology
• Political economy and environment
• Industrial and alternative forestry
• Privatization and regulation of genetically modified organisms
• Commodification
• Environmental politics

Katharine Rankin

Research Interests

• Politics of planning and development
• Feminist and critical theory
• Culture-economy articulations
• Diverse economies
• Comparative market regulation
• Ethnographic methods
• South and Southeast Asia
• Toronto
• Website for ‘Infrastructures of Democracy’ research project: https://infrastructuresofdemocracy.wordpress.com/

Sue Ruddick

Research Interests

• Critical theory, philosophy (both continental and non-western)
• UrbanNatures, Socionatures
• Anti-racism, anti-colonialism
• Social Marginalization
• Wildlife, Animals

Matti Siemiatycki

Research Interests

• Transportation policy and planning
• Infrastructure finance and delivery
• Community and regional planning

Rachel Silvey

Research Interests

• Migration
• Indonesia
• Feminist theory
• Critical development studies
• Politics of transnationalism

Expertise is in the gender dimensions of migration and economic change in Indonesia. Recent research focuses on the ways in which gender politics of migration are inflected by religion.

Neera Singh

Research Interests

• Conservation and development
• Commons and Commoning Practices
• Community forestry, forest rights and governance
• Environmental subjectivity; ethics of care and affective ecologies
• Social movements and environmental justice
• India

Jason Spicer

Research Interests

• political and social movement responses to economic inequality
• urban, regional and community economic development
• cooperatives, alternative enterprises, and the social + solidarity economy
• institutions, organizations, and strategic action fields
• the US, Canada, and Global North in comparative perspective

Sarah Wakefield

Research Interests

• Mobilizing for community food security in Canada
• Community development and neighbourhood change
• Environmental justice/just sustainability
• Critical health geography
• Community-engaged scholarship

Current Research Projects

Unsettling perspectives and contested spaces: Understanding inclusion and (in)justice in Canadian food activism – the Food, Environment, and Activism Study Team (FEAST – http://feast-uoft.org/)

Responding to “Code Red” with “Neighbourhood Action”: Evaluating Hamilton’s Approach to Reducing Neighbourhood-level Health Inequalities – with Jim Dunn (McMaster University)

Michael Widener

Research Interests

• Access to healthy food and healthcare facilities
• Health and transportation geographies
• GIS, agent-based modelling, and spatial optimization

Jun Zhang

Research Interests

• Urban and regional economic development
• Geographic theorizing of markets, states, and institutions
• Geography of innovation and entrepreneurship
• Industrial globalization, localization, and restructuring
• Varieties and variegations of capitalism
• East Asia
• China