Environmental Studies

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/26311

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Open Access
Clowning Canada: Performing the Structured Innocence of Settler Colonial Domesticity
(2024-03-16) Johnson, Morgan Brie; Ford-Smith, Honor
This dissertation is a research-creation project that involves both creative and written outputs. The creative project is an original short film, Land Hunger—a dark, feminist, clown satire of settler colonial nation-state building that explores how gendered histories of domestication were foundational for colonization in Canada and are still viscerally haunting the present. The written component incorporates critical theory, personal reflection, creative writing, and historical research to explore the question: What performance praxes are needed right now for settler artists to create work that pushes against hegemonic yet invisibilized structures of Canadian nationhood? While my research looks at the potential for settler performance practices to unsettle our cultural stories of Canadian-ness, my inspirations and theoretical anchors come from the fields of Indigenous resurgence and decolonization, which centre relationality to the land within research. My theoretical framework grapples with the question of settler artist accountability and responsibility within performance practice, stemming from the argument that culture is integral to the creation and maintenance of power structures (Said, 1994). I follow a genealogical process in the Foucauldian sense, which entails sifting through hauntings between the past and present to find not the origin of nation but rather its palimpsestic and discursive formation on the land and the gendered body. This project originated in the messy, personal, and creative questioning of my relationship to the land I am on, to the nation-state of Canada, to the histories that brought me here, and to the discourses of power that weave through them. I argue that theories of settler colonialism, gender, and whiteness are not just the subject of my research, coincidentally resulting in a creative output; rather, these theories drive the foundational way that I come to understand my relationship to the land and to my performance practice. I attempt to chart an approach to performance practice that makes this central, arguing that settler theatre artists are structurally implicated in the ongoing reification of the colonial project of Canada. Therefore, as storytellers, we can work to make visible and imagine alternatives to white settler structures of nation and subjecthood that are often normalized in settler culture as invisible and unchangeable.
Open Access
Youth Community Arts Experiments and Theories of Change
(2023-12-08) Lombardo, Charlotte Evanthe; Flicker, Sarah
This dissertation asks: how do diverse emerging artists engage community arts in public space to express and enact place and change? It is a case study of the Making With Place project which mobilised youth identifying as QT/BIPOC (queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and/or of colour) to create public art activations. This work began amidst transformations of personal and public space mandated by orders to contain Covid-19, and growing awareness and organising to address anti-Black racism. Grounded in methodologies of participatory action research, I collaborated with the Making With Place youth artist-researchers to engage in cycles of creative sharing, public art experimentation, and reflection and theorizing. The resulting dialogues, artworks and analyses surface underrepresented histories, systems of inequity, internal landscapes of isolation and trauma, and regenerative relationships of resilience and mutual aid. I draw on participant observation, individual interviews, group dialogues, and co-writing to develop a series of academic journal articles and community ‘zine style publications that synthesise and unpack these findings. In these pieces, we discuss emergent creative articulations of place, processes of (re)search, and embodied and affective theories of change. This dissertation deepens understandings of critical pedagogies of place from the margins as a place of radical possibility, with a view towards new, more equitable social relations.
Open Access
Truth and Reconciliation at the Bay: Environmental Discourse, Contested Notions of Human-Creation Relations in Mnidoo Gaamii/Georgian Bay, and Indigenous-Cottager Relations
(2023-12-08) Fraser, Clara MacCallum; Gilbert, Liette; Foster, Jennifer
How does environmental conservation land use planning, an endeavour that seeks to provide tools to combat climate change and protect habitat from destruction through development, contribute to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands/waters in Mnidoo Gamii/Georgian Bay? Through an exploration of the links between environmental planning, cottager conservation activism, and colonialism in Georgian Bay (and North America, broadly speaking), my dissertation explores the ways that conservation land use planning continues the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. As a springboard for this exploration, I examine particular communities in Georgian Bay - Moose Deer Point First Nation, the nearby cottage community of the Madawaska Club at Go Home Bay, and the Georgian Bay Land Trust with properties along the eastern coast of Georgian Bay – their establishment, influence, and impacts on one another. While the surface layer of this dissertation is focused on environmental conservation planning and Indigenous rights, another layer is focused on how settler and Indigenous ideas of human-earth relations are formed by fundamentally different cosmologies and legalities. For this reason, I interview members of the First Nation, as well as members of the cottage community who are also volunteers for the Land Trust, to gain insight into Indigenous and settler perspectives on human-earth relationships and Georgian Bay and the undercurrents that shape the ways that lands and “resources” are managed through settler land use planning systems. This research provides insight into the impacts of land use planning in Georgian Bay on Indigenous communities, and enhances an understanding of how land use planning undermines processes of truth and reconciliation. My research is guided by Indigenous research paradigms, thus I work to "unsettle" my own settler worldview, exploring one way that decolonisation praxis can look and feel. I situate land use planning within the context of Indigenous ways of knowing, such as Creation stories, ceremony, and rooted law, giving non-Indigenous readers an opportunity to reflect on the ways that endeavours such as environmental conservation, which can seem universally beneficial, can in fact be harmful. This research adds to the literature by bringing into dialogue two different communities’ stories about identity in relation to land. I explore the historical context and cosmological foundations that help problematise certain assumptions and narratives. Secondly, as I do so, I employ a semi-auto-ethnographic approach, which both reveals my own relationship to this history, and sheds light on my own journey of trying to follow Indigenous research methods. I hope that this research can contribute to the discourse around settler researchers engaging with Indigenous methodologies.
Open Access
Applying Mixed Methodologies to Inform Urban Conservation: Policy, Knowledge and Behaviour at the Interface of Nature and Society
(2023-12-08) Van Vierssen Trip, Nyssa MacAllister; Bazely, Dawn R. A.
Globally biodiversity is in decline and the human population is urbanizing. The loss of species is so great, it has been dubbed the “sixth mass extinction.” Over half of the global population now live in cities. There is the loss of biodiversity coupled with the loss of experience of nature in our daily lives. Interacting with nature has been linked to improved health and well-being. Despite the co-benefits for both people and nature, there is an implementation gap between the science, policy and practice. My dissertation applied the concept of scale from spatial (landscape) ecology to an interdisciplinary context: peoples’ values of nature. At a local scale, I explored peoples’ emotions towards urban greenspaces in a large Canadian city, during a time of abrupt change and societal shock – the COVID-19 pandemic. Parks acted as an emotional buffer, as places of escape and recovery. Parks as a support to well-being can be leveraged and translated into political capital for park maintenance and for park and greenspace expansion in large urban centers. At a national scale, my coauthors and I investigated Canadians’ values towards native bees and perceived barriers towards their conservation. Canadians value native bees for their contribution to people and want the federal and provincial governments to take the lead in their conservation. This grassroots support for conservation should be communicated to decision-makers. At the global scale, I analyzed publications from two environmental organizations to study how the conversation about sustainability has changed over the past 25 years. Funding shapes sustainability communication. Expectations and priorities of donors can hinder capitalization on known science. Making knowledge accessible and relevant to funders informs sustainability practice. Collectively, these results provide insights into biodiversity conservation in urban contexts and sustainability practice.
Open Access
Migrant Plants: Arts-Based Inquiry into Plant-Human Relations
(2023-12-08) Gelis, Alexandra Cristiina; Barndt, Deborah
This dissertation is a multi-layered exploration of the process of research and the creation of four main projects containing ten multimedia artworks. While probing plant-human and more-than-human relations in the context of colonization, I use arts-based participatory methodologies, acknowledging different ways of knowing and plant agency as well as critical plant studies. The context of the artworks originates in San Basilio de Palenque in the Caribbean area of Colombia. Following my own migration and the migration of plants, the final work is situated in Toronto, Canada, where I probe in-depth plant-human relations through the concept of migrant co-relations.
Open Access
The Ontopolitics of Complexity: Toward Agonistic Democracy and Ecological Political Economy
(2023-12-08) Mallery, David Michael; Bunch, Martin J.
Complexity is among the most used yet rarely defined and often misunderstood terms in sustainability science. In this text, I argue that the conventionalization of the concept of complexity has resulted in the conflation of “thin” (i.e., reductionist) complexity and “thick” (i.e., perspectivist) complexity, and the resultant confusion surrounding these categories has created unnecessary tensions between sustainability science and environmental justice. Employing William E. Connolly’s ontopolitical-genealogical approach, I tease out implicit ontological commitments relating to complexity, holism, organicism, and environmental determinism, in the intellectual history of systems theory, cybernetics, and theoretical ecology. I critique key interlocutors in the pluralism debate within ecological economics to illustrate how conventionalized complexity has created barriers to pluralistic engagement between ecological economics and political ecology. Following radical democratic theorists, I argue that the distinction between thick and thin complexity is essential to fostering “agonistic pluralism” between sustainability science and environmental justice while also serving as a defence against the misuse of systems concepts by anti-pluralists, authoritarians, and technocrats. I argue that totalizing, functionalist expressions of systems theory exacerbate political violence by displacing political discourse and serving as a pretext for ecofascism. As an alternative to functionalist organicism, I articulate a relational ontology of life, in the tradition of Robert Rosen and Terrance Deacon, that creates affordances for agency that is both creative and reflexive. I explore how such an ontology destabilizes politically conservative, neoliberal, anti-pluralist interpretations of thin complexity, and I argue that thick complexity, relational holism, and teleodynamism can serve as core concepts for a more robust discourse in ecological political economy that is concurrently attentive to the dual imperatives of biophysical limits and environmental justice.
Open Access
Making Social Movement: The reproductive labour of organizing from Chiapas to Chicago and beyond
(2023-12-08) Schussler, Stuart Edward; Kipfer, Stefan Andreas
This is a dissertation about acting on inspiration. The Chicago-based Autonomous University of Social Movements (AUSM) coordinates one of the most long-standing, intensive engagements with the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, through its study abroad programs fomenting such inspiration among university students from across North America. Yet my research into the ensuing political activity of alumni of this program exposes a dilemma: despite the Zapatistas’ success in building autonomy on the land they reclaimed during their 1994 uprising, the great majority of alumni do not invoke them or replicate their organizing structures within their organizations back home. Rather than exposing a break in the chain of inspiration between the Zapatistas, AUSM, and its alumni, the continuity between the three lies in their common organizing activity. What does the activity of the Zapatistas, AUSM, and its alumni teach us about the collaborative practices that comprise “organizing”? I contribute to Social Reproduction Theory in finding organizing to be reproductive labour: collaborative activity producing use values in an effort to transform the distribution of abundance and scarcity across society, as to reproduce people with more life and less exhaustion. Secondly, I contribute to the practice of organizing by highlighting common activities across the organizing of the Zapatistas, AUSM and its alumni, including maintaining initiative, confronting “messes” by strengthening collaborative arrangements, practicing care on ever-broader levels, and building subjectivities of self-determination. Third, I contribute to Marxist theories by linking the everyday practice of organizing with an enriched understanding of “social movement,” as struggle to transform the relations shaping flows of health and wealth across society. This shows that inspiration continues, inasmuch as it feeds organizers’ initiative to do the difficult work of strengthening militant ways of being-with.
Open Access
Ballads for Remembering
(2023-08-04) O'Brien, Shelley Katherine; Fawcett,Leesa K.
Ballads for Re-Membering is an examination of themes of consciousness such as time, space and emergence, set against the precarity of the climate crisis. Using an arts-and-Zen-practice-based methodology of research-creation, and a theoretical framework of New Materialism and Post-Humanism (“K(now)n Materialism”), this feminist response to the climate crisis manifests an otherwise-possible that is already right-here, taking cues from the emergent playful worlds of childhood studies and music, with interbeing as the net holding all. The dissertation is important because the climate crisis is one of (if not the most) pressing and crucial challenges of the present, and we must keep finding ways to address it using our imaginations. Because my work uses a research-creation process, the methodology provides a unique opportunity to look at a complex set of issues in a nuanced and artistic way. The form also belies the function: These creative and academic outputs fold and knead together conceptual spaces; playful and engaging imaginings that slip through our habitual systematic thinking in linear time, space, and forward progress. In the form of three Ballads, I look at time, space, and emergence (Ballad 1), offer a critical analysis of the New Nature Movement, look at childhood and time, and music (Ballad 2), and perform an audio story called Finding Solace (Ballad 3). This young adult story takes the research to the speculative: What if there was a world (mostly) without humans, where Artificial Intelligence was so intelligent, it went on “living” without humanity? The key results of this work include making new forms of knowledge as ways of understanding our precarity; innovative research methods like song, story, and letters to my daughter; engaging and accessible research outcomes, and contributions to the field of New Materialism, Research-Creation, and artistic responses to climate change. It is my hope that this work encourages other researchers to explore interdisciplinary approaches, allows for engagement due to its accessibility, and contributes to a greater understanding of our interbeing.
Open Access
Security in Uncertainty: Analysis of Climate Risks and Household Response to Food Insecurity in Northern Ghana
(2023-08-04) Osman, Balikisu; Perkins, Patricia Elaine
Ghana represents an important case study for food insecurity research because of the high concentration of hungry populations in the country’s north relative to the south. While the increasing climate change and weather variabilities in north Ghana explain the region’s widespread hunger, there are also non-climatic factors that undermine households’ vulnerability. This dissertation explores smallholder farming households’ experiences with climate hazard events by emphasizing their vulnerabilities and response behaviours to climate and seasonality-induced food insecurities. It adopts a micro-level food systems lens integrated with livelihoods, vulnerability, and disaster risk theories. It is also informed by fieldwork and engagement with farming households in northern Ghana. A key argument of this dissertation is that food insecurity in northern Ghana is influenced by not only the climate-dependency of food system activities in the region but also the vulnerability in how food is produced, harvested, stored, and marketed. The findings reveal that climate change events lead to food crop productivity losses, cause damage to stored grain, and disrupt food prices, which affects food security. It also shows how households’ and food systems’ vulnerabilities intensify these climatic impacts and the concomitant variations in yearly food availability and access. The study further finds that poor households are not passive victims; they strategically adopt various actions to manage climate-induced food insecurity risks. In particular, the households’ responses follow a sequential order to preserve critical assets for current consumption needs and for the sustainability of agricultural livelihood. However, some of the response actions are associated with excruciating costs that could rebound and erode efforts for sustainable food security, especially for women and youth. Overall, the research provides evidence-based knowledge to address climate-related challenges for food security in the northern part of the country and to minimize regional disparities, which have long-term political implications. It also makes a strong case to draw attention to the diversity, sequence, and gendered nature of household responses to food crises.
Open Access
Sacrifice or Salvation: How can Animal Lives be Spared and Human Health Improved by Toxics Reform?
(2023-03-28) Wordsworth, Anne Marie; Ali, Syed Harris
This dissertation investigates the complexities of the entwined relations between animal cognition, the use of animals in toxicity testing, and the proliferation and impacts of harmful chemicals in our society. It asks how, in light of the most current research on animal sentience and the ethics of responsibility, a reorientation of chemical testing at a theoretical, ethical and practical level could spare animal suffering and improve human health outcomes. Its starting point is the unfolding scientific research on animal cognition, and the consequent implications for reconsidering the ethical relationships, historically established and currently assumed, between human and non-human animals. The central issue, which infuses this dissertation, is whether humans are obliged by this knowledge to expand our moral arena to encompass animals, to acknowledge their entitlement not to be used for toxicity experimentation, and the implications of such an entitlement for the future use of animals in toxicity testing. The work is based on a social constructivist process centred on the multiple facets of toxicity testing – the philosophical viewpoints of those who have expressed concern for the well-being of animals, governments’ animal protection laws that fail to spare animals from painful experimentation, toxics laws that promote the use of animals in toxicity tests, the pain and suffering of the tests themselves, the championing of the mouse as the favoured animal for experimentation, and the limitations and failure of toxicity testing itself to safeguard public health and the environment from widespread contamination. In addition, this examination of toxicity testing looks at the potential differences between advocates of expanded testing of toxic chemicals and animal advocates concerned about the implications of expanded testing for the increased use of animals. Finally, building on qualitative methods for assessing the current state of knowledge regarding the use of animals in toxicity testing, this dissertation evaluates how this system could be redrawn to both spare animals and better gauge the toxicity of chemicals.
Open Access
"Bologna is a School of Activism": TransFeministQueer Autonomy and Urban Spatial Praxis
(2023-03-28) Patrick, Darren Joseph; Sandilands, Catriona A. H.
“‘Bologna is a School of Activism’” is an activist ethnography of the Bologna-based transfeminist and queer autonomous collective Laboratorio Smaschieramenti (Laboratory of/for Demasculinization/Unmasking) and a history of Atlantide, the occupied and self-managed space that was its home from 1998 to 2015. The dissertation presents the Laboratorio’s distinctive approach to autonomy and argues that its praxes comprise a queer urban ecology of autonomous praxis. Positioned as an intervention into urban political ecology and queer geographies, I adopt a transversal and translational understanding of both autonomous social movements and the spatio-political praxes that sustain non-institutional knowledge production. The dissertation’s multi-method approach integrates activist archive-making, life-historical and semi-structured interviews, participant observation, media analysis, translation, and auto-inchiesta––or, collective self-inquiry––a method rooted in the Italian social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Across six chapters, I describe the evolution of the Laboratorio and Atlantide and develop the notion of ecologies of praxis to situate the place-based production of radical theory. Chapter 1, “Towards Ecologies of TransFeministQueer Autonomous Praxis,” reviews the literatures of urban political ecology, feminist and queer ecologies, geographies of sexuality, and feminist/queer geographies, and presents a critique of the disciplinary divergence of queer from feminist geographies by way of the former field’s appeal to queer of color scholarship and intersectional analysis. Chapters 2 and 3 build on the work of collective activist archive-making both to describe the epistemopolitics of transfeministqueer knowledge production and to situate Atlantide as a distinctive kind of space in which the traditions of autonomous Marxism have been actively recomposed. Chapter 4 details the evolution of the Laboratorio and describes its four main areas of political praxis. Chapters 5 and 6 tell the story of the Laboratorio’s and Atlantide’s engagements with the municipal government of Bologna and detail the circumstances that led to the eviction of Atlantide in 2015. As a whole, “‘Bologna is a School of Activism’” argues for an ecological understanding of the intersectionality of political struggles.
Open Access
The Lake is History: Photographic Archives and the Black Atlantic in Essex County
(2022-12-14) Lobo, Rachel; Ford-Smith, Honor
This dissertation situates Lake Erie and its environs as part of the Black Atlantic. Specifically, it maps the complex portrait of those environs as they emerge within the photographic archive of the Alvin D. McCurdy fonds. This dissertation follows the flow of vernacular photographs across Lake Erie to map transnational networks of kinship and highlight the affective labour that sustained these bonds. I argue that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Essex County was a microcosm of global colonial power relationships structured with racial and gender-based hierarchies. I therefore extend Paul Gilroy’s (1993) Black Atlantic paradigm to the world of marine fluidity that is the Great Lakes. I propose that attention to this particular site allows us to unsteady tidy national histories of Black struggle refreshing and transforming our understanding of notions of kinship and resistance speaking to the circulatory and hybrid nature of ideas, activists, and the movement of key cultural and political artifacts. I demonstrate both the richness of cultural struggle in relation to ideas about race and nation, and also the dimensions of oppositional practice which are not reducible to narrow ideas about resistance. I position the work of performing, producing, and displaying vernacular photographs as a form of gendered labour and care work that created practices of affiliation and opposition against the enclosures brought on by the formation of racialized space. Threaded through each chapter is an exploration of what a transnational vision might offer our understanding of the relationship between labour and cultural production. The narratives disclosed by the photographs within the McCurdy fonds recover some of the lost history of communities that were essential to the formation of a global system of racial capital, and the reproduction of its oppositional cultures.
Open Access
Understanding Anishinaabek G'giikendaaswinmin (knowledge) on N'bi (water), Naaknigewin (law) and Nokomis Giizis (Grandmother Moon) in the Great Lakes Territory for Water Governance
(2022-12-14) Bell Chiblow, Susan Anne; McGregor, Deborah
The Canadian settler state lacks a gender balance in N’bi governance and decision making. Little documentation articulates Anishinaabek understandings of reconciliation and how reconciliation can assist with reconciling different legal orders and governance structures which includes Nokomis Giizis (grandmother moon). Drawing on Anishinaabek from the Great Lakes territory, this research explores how does Anishinaabek law construct the role of women in N’bi decision making; can the broader discourse in Canada about reconciliation assist with improving humanity’s relationship to N’bi; how can the concept of reconciliation assist with reconciling different legal orders, and governance structures; what are the relationships and responsibilities between Anishinaabek and Nokomis Giizis and how can these relationships inform N’bi governance including women’s roles. This study utilized an Anishinaabek Research Paradigm (ARP) that employs Indigenous Intelligence as a conceptual framework for qualitative Anishinaabek analysis of data throughout the study. G’giikendaaswinmin shared through conversations, key informants and a focus group are provided into three separate manuscripts. Manuscript One: Indigenous Water Governance: Anishinaabek naaknigewin (law) Constructs the Role of Anishinaabek kweok (women) in N’bi (water) Decision Making supports and expands on existing literature of kweok as N’bi carriers with roles and responsibilities to and specific knowledge of N’bi. It demonstrates that men have a role in N’bi governance and reveals how Anishinaabek naaknigewin constructs the role of kweok in N’bi decision making. Manuscript Two: N’bi Can Teach us about Reconciliation demonstrates how N’bi can teach humanity about reconciliation which could address environmental conflict. It reveals that Anishinaabek understanding of reconciliation is different than mainstream society and is about relationships between Anishinaabek and non-Indigenous but also about relationships with N’bi. Manuscript Three: Relationships and Responsibilities between Anishinaabek and Nokomis Giizis (Grandmother Moon) can Inform N’bi (water) Governance establishes that Anishinaabek understand the relationships and responsibilities to Nokomis Giizis through the cycles of both kweok and Nokomis Giizis that is guided through Anishinaabek naaknigewin. In brief, this study supports and expands that kweok need to be involved in water governance based on their knowledge and relationships with N’bi and Nokomis Giizis.
Open Access
Toward a Becoming Encounter: Arts-Based Research, Representation and Animal-Human Relations
(2022-12-14) Marino, Sara Kate; Barndt, Deborah
This dissertation integrates philosophical concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s Becoming-animal and Buber’s I-Thou Encounters to create a conceptual metaphor that I call A Becoming Encounter. Through an arts-based methodology, the production and examination of several art objects (my own and others), and the ways in which they relate to the lived experience of animals, (using Lefebvre and content analysis), a theoretical framework is developed aimed at informing future representation and shaping future relationships with nonhuman animals and environments. Toward A Becoming Encounter is a step toward an anti-anthropocentric ethics of representation and a way of being.
Open Access
Indigenous Workers and Trade Unions: Settler-Colonial Capitalism, Indigenous Peoples' Labour and Union Engagement
(2022-12-07) Alia Neisha Karim; Stefan Andreas Kipfer
Open Access
Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond
(2022-08-08) Turner, Camille Joy; Ford-Smith, Honor
My project probes the silences of Newfoundland’s colonial past by making connections between faraway lands on the other side of the Atlantic that seem, on the surface, to have nothing to do with this geography, but are, in fact, socially, economically, and geologically entangled. It traverses the landscape and the seascape of the island, linking it to Europe and Africa and back again. It makes this journey by land and ship in search of what lies beneath what can be seen, in search of the deeper geologies of this eastern tip of Canada. I use a research-creation approach to critically investigate this silence – a silence that shrouds a ghostly past that is still present. I draw on the idea of hauntology, which Avery Gordon (2008) theorizes as a social force manifested in unsettled feelings that occur in response to loss and violence that are systematically denied but are still present, and which Viviane Saleh Hanna (2015) explains as colonial delusions that underpin modernity. Guided by my feeling of being haunted, I lift the shroud that envelops this history. In so doing, I unmap Newfoundland, revealing its connections to the Atlantic trade in humans and defamiliarizing what appears to be an innocent landscape that has not been tampered with. The results of this unmapping are expressed by the interdisciplinary artworks Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland (2019), Nave (2021), and Sarah (2021), which accompany this written record of the dissertation. The written portion of this project also retraces and records the steps of my own artistic process and the journeys I have made by walking on land, travelling across the ocean in the hold of a ship through the archival records, and mapping the process of my work, the ‘facts’ I encountered, and the affects these produced in my own body and which guided the choices I made about how to represent or perform them. I explore all these as they appear and evolve throughout this research-creation process.
Open Access
Communicating Climate Change: An Examination of Narrative Intuition, Transmedia Acumen, and Emotional Intelligence in the Presentation of the Transmedia Emotional Engagement Storytelling (TREES) Model
(2022-08-08) Osborne, Neil Stuart; Etcheverry, Jose
This dissertation contextualizes a new model to help design more effective communication campaigns aimed at addressing the climate emergency. My multi-pronged research approach led me to discover three key competencies, or abilities—(1) Narrative Intuition, (2) Transmedia Acumen, and (3) Emotional Intelligence—that can be combined to bring about deeper and lasting emotional engagement with climate change storyworlds. The public is inundated with climate change discourse unlike ever before, yet most of us remain superficially engaged with solutions to the crisis because of a multifaceted set of challenges that are unique to climate change communications. To this end, climate change communicators should consider the efficacy of narrative affect—or how affective experiences result in varying levels of emotional engagement and ultimately influence how people live out their lives. To transport people into climate change storyworlds, this dissertation asserts that transmedia storytelling, or the worldbuilding process, can place a renewed emphasis on the affective dimensions of our engagement with climate change. Across five chapters, I use a transmedial econarratological lens to answer two core research questions: (1) How is a successful transmedia storytelling climate change campaign structured? (2) What does a novel transmedia storytelling model for the modern climate change campaign comprise? In Chapter 1, I affirm that narrative building can serve as an effective strategy for climate change campaigns. Chapter 2 is divided into four parts that explore the prevailing challenges that surround climate change communications, as well as, theories of narrative, transmedial narrative, and engagement, and in parallel, the Degree of Narrativity, Degree of Transmediality, and Degree of Engagement—the main branches of the TREES Model I present in Chapter 5. In Chapter 3, I highlight the ethnographic methodological lens I used to conduct my research. In Chapter 4, I examine the structure and best practices of two exemplary transmedia storytelling campaigns. Finally, in Chapter 5, I elaborate on the origins of my TREES Model to introduce three key competencies used in the production of a storyworld that evokes emotional engagement with audiences. This document concludes with a summary of recommendations to inspire additional research.
Open Access
A Post-Colonial Era? Bridging Ml'kmaq and Irish Experiences of Colonialism
(2022-03-03) Alderson, Aedan; Gilbert, Liette
This dissertation explores the links between the past and present impacts of colonization in Ireland and colonization in Mikmaki (the unceded territories of the Mi'kmaq Confederacy known to Canadians as the Maritimes provinces). It asks how might deepening our understandings of these potential links inform accountable and decolonial relationships between the Irish and the Mikmaq? In doing so, it argues that comparatively examining Irish and Mikmaq experiences of colonialism can offer concrete insights not only into the way that the Irish and the Mikmaq have an interwoven past, but also the way that the legacies of colonialism are permeating everyday life in the present in both regions. Refusing colonial representations of Mi'kma'ki and recentering Mi'kmaq worldviews throughout this comparison, this dissertation presents Mi'kma'ki as a discrete and sovereign (occupied) territory. The dissertation begins by providing an overview of the geographical and sociopolitical context of Ireland and Mi'kma'ki while introducing some of the links that have caused community members in both nations to call for this type of comparative research to be completed. The second chapter explores key historical moments in Irish and Mi'kmaq history which serve not just as a foundation for understanding the historical context of current experiences of colonialism in both regions, but also highlights the way that Ireland and Mi'kma'ki have had their pasts interwoven by British colonialism and the Irish diaspora. Drawing on oral life histories gathered in the bordertowns between County Donegal and Derry/Londonderry in Ireland, as well as Eskasoni First Nation in Unama'ki (Cape Breton) in Mi'kma'ki, the third and fourth chapters respectively explore the way that Irish and Mi'kmaq community members are currently experiencing the impacts of the legacies of British colonialism in everyday life. Finally, the dissertation concludes by reiterating the main insights shared by community members around the current state of colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization in both regions, before briefly discussing the postdoctoral research (and other areas of inquiry) that are expanding the inquiry of this project further while highlighting how the Irish and Lnuk might use the insights from the project to increase their collaborations and support one another.
Open Access
Multi-Species Cities for the Anthropocene: Narrativizing Human-Wildlife Relations in an Urban Organizational Niche
(2022-03-03) Luther, Erin Elizabeth; Fawcett, Leesa K.
Amidst academic debates about how wildlife conservation should adapt in a postnatural world, big conservation NGOs have shown an increasing interest in cities as the kind of humanized landscapes that may define conservation for the Anthropocene. This research explores the ways that their emerging focus on urban natures represents a potential friction point with organizations who navigate the urban/wild relationship at close range through direct interventions with everyday human-wildlife encounters. I look at the work of four organizations involved in narrativizing ethical relations with wildlife in a large Canadian city: three urban wildlife organizations (UWOs) defined by their on-the-ground responses to encounters with wildlife and their involvement in urban coexistence education and, comparatively, a branch of an international conservation organization located in the same city. Through a series of staff and volunteer interviews and a qualitative analysis of organizational grey literature, I consider the evolution of an urban wildlife field, the organizations different engagements with affective wildlife encounters, and the way ideas of nature and postnature are mobilized in their practice and discourse about human-wildlife relations. I find that 1. Urban wildlife organizations are under-recognized as part of the institutional infrastructure of cities and their practice is characterized by struggles over funding and identity; 2. The big conservation organizations engagement with the city as a site of connection to nature evades the costs and complications of affective encounters that shape UWO practice ; and 3. The communications of the big conservation organization reflect in some ways the new human-centred conservation, posing explicit challenge to the fields historical attachment to a human/nature divide. The UWOs in this study, in contrast, remained invested in this division as a guideline for a harm-reduced coexistence. I conclude by exploring how UWOs fidelity to the human/nature divide speaks to relational theories about urban multispecies cosmopolitics, and how an appreciation of their interventionist niche might inform the aspirational project of the more-than-human city.
Open Access
Assessing Agroecological Principles at the Intervale in Burlington, Vermont: A Case Study and Multimethod Research with a Participatory Approach in a Peri-Urban Socioecological System
(2022-03-03) Juncos, Maria Alicia; Gilbert, Liette
The emerging field of urban agroecology promises to mend the prevalent unsustainable rupture between rural and urban/peri-urban agri-food endeavors since global industrial conglomerates took power. My research contributes to the efforts of mending this rupture by, first, advancing the academic discussion on how to fill an evidence-based gap on the use of the much theorized multidimensional and cross-disciplinary principles of agroecology to assess community-based agri-food systems beyond the farm level. To do so, my research uses the fifteen principles of agroecology proposed by the non-profit Coopération Internationale pour le Développement et la Solidarité (CIDSE, 2018). Second, my research expands the understanding of how these agroecological principles may be put into practice in different cases and scenarios, especially in urbanized environments. This investigation uses a single significant case study methodology to share a place-based experience as a possible example of urban agroecology. The case study is a 340-acre information-rich peri-urban organic agroecosystem in Burlington, Vermont, owned and managed by the Intervale Center. My research investigates how the Intervale, a non-profit organization and socioecological system, may be practicing agroecology and consider opportunities to strengthen such practices. My investigation involves a principles-focused and context-sensitive baseline assessment (inspired by Patton, 2018) using a qualitative multimethod framework and a participatory action research (PAR) approach. The multimethod framework triangulates a 'practical' PAR stream of inquiry for the co-creation of knowledge with a purposive sample of participants (semi-structured interviews with visual tools such as CIDSEs agroecological principles infographic, site mapping, and photovoicing) and a 'theoretical' stream where the researcher connects theory to practice (participatory observation, photo-documentation, and document analysis) for an integrated analysis. According to observations and participants' responses, the Intervale follows agroecological principles. The collective practices related to the agroecological principles of strengthening local food producers and community and nourishing biodiversity and soils are most prevalent at the Intervale. The organization also plays a noticeable role under the principle of enhancing the power of the local market and building on a social and solidarity economy. There are also some specific areas of intervention in the organizations operations to achieve higher levels of agroecological transformation, especially under the principles of fostering more diversity and solidarity, encouraging stronger participation of food producers, and promoting more farmer-to-farmer exchanges. Conclusively, this research reduces the evidence-based gap between the theory supporting a set of agroecological principles and their application beyond the farm level and in an urbanized setting. The comprehensive methodology and the results illuminate how the Intervale's placed-based practices could serve as an example to advance urban agroecology in North America and even other regions.