Geography

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/27574

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Access status: Open Access ,
Low-Income, Racialized Women's Experiences of Housing Access in Lawrence Heights, Toronto, Canada
(2026-03-10) Bhuiyan, Raushan Ara; Peake, Linda J.
This thesis investigates the experiences of low-income, racialized women in Toronto’s Lawrence Heights during ongoing redevelopment in the early twenty-first century. Grounded in an intersectional feminist urban studies framework, it examines how poverty, gender, and race shape access to affordable housing and employment, and how social networks mediate everyday challenges and sense of belonging. The study draws on qualitative interviews with residents and insights from service providers alongside social network analysis to explore housing search, employment precarity, discrimination in rental markets, housing repair issues, community safety concerns, and participation in revitalization consultations. Findings highlight multiple barriers to securing adequate housing and stable work, while showing how family, neighbours, and community ties provide resilience, mutual support, and locally specific knowledge. The thesis contributes empirically by centering the voices of marginalized women in Lawrence Heights, analytically by linking intersectionality, social networks, place, and belonging in the context of redevelopment, and materially by speaking to debates on social mix policy and urban planning in Canada.
Access status: Open Access ,
Land, Infrastructure, and the Geographies of Class Power in the Early 21st Century Philippines
(2026-03-10) Cardenas, Kenneth Lawrence Fondevilla; Kelly, Philip
This dissertation considers the relationship between capitalist class power and urbanization in the global South through the rise and transformation of large, diversified conglomerates in the Philippines from 2001 to 2025. It draws from postcolonial urban theory to provincialize claims about the relationship between the concentration of wealth and global urbanization. It also draws from Polanyian economic geography and sociology to recentre attention on urban land as a focus for understanding the relationships between place, history, and ongoing reinventions and resurgences of class power. Through a critical reading of corporate disclosures, interviews with business and regulatory elites, and a critical discourse analysis of the artefacts of market design, it forwards the following arguments. Firstly, that the present transformation of Philippine capitalism owes to irreducible, place-specific contours of market-oriented reform as shaped by economic nationalism, a moralized understanding of economic life, and elite capture of the state’s role in creating and enforcing property relations. Secondly, that the recent successes of Philippine-nationality conglomerates are built upon a nexus between global flows of labour and remittances, and embedded advantages with respect to land ownership and regulatory capture. Their position astride this nexus enables oligopolistic and oligopsonistic power, mainly coded as nationalist protectionism, but also as invocations of market orthodoxy in newly-privatized activities and assets. Thirdly, that in maximizing these advantages, these conglomerates have converged on a pattern of vertically-integrated rentierism across property development, energy, water, telecommunications, and transportation infrastructure, and banking. Throughout, these arguments are brought into dialogue with the landscapes of privatizations, urbanizations, and infrastructure crises, highlighting ideational and material dimensions to place. This research illustrates the role of commodity fictions, as embedded in a place and its history, for the new geographies of class power. In particular, it involves the continuity of rentierism as a class interest in a Southern, peripheral society, across cycles of both boom and bust in their material interests and of ideological fashion. It draws attention to an enduring role of land that has more in common with previous rounds of accumulation than with the prototypical financialized, gentrified role of cities in accumulation, and therefore argues for attention to smaller spatial and institutional scales, and longer temporal scales, in pluralizing the geographies of class power in the 21st century.
Access status: Open Access ,
Cartographies of the Colonized Body: Aesthetic Violence and Fatphobia in Lima, Peru
(2026-03-10) Rodriguez, Rosario Del Pilar; Wood, Patricia Burke
This thesis examines fatphobia and aesthetic violence in Lima, Peru, as structural and colonial phenomena rather than individual prejudice or cultural preference. It asks how colonialism has shaped body ideals, how digital platforms reinforce or resist it, and how Peruvian fat activists mobilize against neoliberal and colonial constructions of the body. Drawing on personal narratives, body maps, and testimonies of five women from the Anti-fatphobia Peru Collective, as well as autoethnography, the study situates fatness within geographies and discourses that are legacies of colonial violence that continue to be sustained by racism, sexism, classism, and healthism. Methodologically, it combines cuerpo-territorio, case studies and autoethnography to revalue ancestral legacies and spirituality as sources of knowledge. The findings reveal the normalization of fatphobic violence in medical, institutional, and media settings, alongside emergent digital and collective resistances. The thesis contributes to bridging Fat Studies with urban geography and Latin American feminist and decolonial thought, affirming bodily sovereignty as essential for justice, dignity, and life.
Access status: Open Access ,
A Thermodynamic Audit of the Surface Energy Budget of the Hudson Bay Complex (HBC) from 1980 – 2024 Using the ECMWF ERA5 Climate Reanalysis Model
(2026-03-10) Klassen, Haley Brooklyn; Bello, Richard
This study conducts a comprehensive thermodynamic audit of the Hudson Bay Complex (HBC) from 1980 to 2024 using the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5 reanalysis model to quantify long-term changes in the regional surface energy budget. Results reveal significant basin-wide warming characterized by near-equal increases in net shortwave and incoming longwave radiation, despite the absence of statistically significant trends in incoming solar radiation. These changes are primarily attributed to declining surface albedo and enhanced greenhouse forcing, amplifying regional energy retention over the study period. Subsurface heat fluxes demonstrate a marked spatial redistribution, with net warming progressing northward from James Bay into central Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait. Concurrently, theice-covered season has shortened, and the open-water period has lengthened by several weeks, with mean annual sea-ice cover declining between 2–4% per decade. The observed energy imbalance reflects a shift from an ice-dominated to a thermodynamically active, open-water regime. This transition has critical implications for ocean-atmosphere coupling, primary productivity, and ecological stability within the HBC. A possible relationship between surface temperature warming and the increase in incoming longwave radiation is postulated as a main factor influencing the shifting sea-ice seasons and thermodynamic changes. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that the HBC constitutes one of the most climatically sensitive marine systems within the circumpolar Arctic.
Access status: Open Access ,
Teetering on the Edge of Surplus: Neurodivergent Work, Social Reproduction, and Bodyminds in the Ontario Labour Market
(2026-03-10) Pawliw-Fry, Anna Grace; Tufts, W. Steven
Disabled workers have received scarce attention from labour geography, revealing a productivist tendency within the field. In this study, I employ neurodiversity as a position of epistemic authority. Using twenty- two semi-structured interviews, I explore how neurodivergent workers navigate a neoliberal labour market characterized by polarization, precarity, and emotional labour. While many neurodivergent adults are pushed into the classic lumpenproletarian, my study reveals that a segment become the ‘liminal lumpenproletariat,’ workers who consciously occupy positions of persistent precarity to agentively manage their disability. I argue that these workers act at multiple geographic scales to manage their neurodivergence with high temporal, financial, social, and mental costs. My conclusions draw from Cripistemological co-creation to imagine alternative neurodivergent visions of work. Altogether, this thesis asserts that the costs of managing disablement under capitalism offer novel insights into labour geography scholarship, (dis)abling its current narrative of precarious work.
Access status: Open Access ,
(Re)making resource frontiers through everyday violence and social movements in the uplands of mainland Southeast Asia
(2026-03-10) Roberts, Kimberly Beth; Vandergeest, Peter
In 2010, Myanmar began to transition from 48 years of military rule to a quasi-demilitarized and democratized government. This process attracted international attention to the country and increased investments in resource extraction. In this dissertation, I ask how historical relationships and present tensions between an assemblage of actors, resources, and spaces produce resource frontiers. To examine how state and non-state military-private partnerships and social movements co-constitute one another and resource frontiers, I developed a research approach using feminist collaborative methods. For three years (2015-2018) I worked with a team to conduct research with civil society organizations (CSOs) and in communities impacted by two sites of resource extraction: Tigyit Coal Mine and Power Plant and Mong Ton Hydropower Project. I argue that as a historical formation, resource frontiers intertwine with violence and capitalist extraction; and, as an unfolding process, they deeply affect everyday lives. To make this argument, I historicize resource frontiers and demonstrate how specific frontier projects dismantle and recreate property systems and nature-society relationships, often while leaving ongoing violence and exclusion in their wake. I highlight the interconnections between frontier-making, fragmented sovereignties, and conflict, while also demonstrating the everyday lived realities of frontiers. In this research, I conceptualize the way that globally-connected and historically-situated resource frontiers shape sovereignty, war, and access for localized frontier actors; and, in turn, how frontier actors remake nature, nation, and global trade. Through my focus of the everyday violence communities experience from resource frontiers and how fragmented sovereignties from an under-explored region interact with an under-explored actor (CSOs), I contribute to an expanded understanding of sovereignties, resource frontiers, and violence.
Access status: Open Access ,
Mercury Supply at Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mines in Africa: Actors, Distribution and Networks
(2025-11-11) Achamah, Felicia; Zalik, Anna
Through a regional case study of Ghana, this thesis explores the role mercury plays in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and broader agrarian livelihoods, in rural sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it seeks to introduce a fresh perspective to the debate on mercury in the region’s ASM sector, which has focused predominantly on the environmental and health-related impacts linked to its widespread usage. With ASM responsible for close to 40 percent of global anthropogenic emissions of mercury, donors and international NGOs have pushed to minimize – and where possible, eliminate altogether – its use. Findings reveal that mercury distribution and supply networks are firmly entrenched, populated by actors who are also embedded in the circuits linked to gold production at ASM sites. It is hoped that findings such as those reported here will help to stimulate a critical reflection on mercury management in the region’s ASM sector.
Access status: Open Access ,
Clarifying the Role of Wildfires and Permafrost Thaw in Brownification in a Shallow Boreal Lake Using Paleolimnological Analyses of Diatom Assemblage Change
(2025-11-11) Wu, Thomas; Korosi, Jennifer B.
Permafrost thaw in discontinuous permafrost peatlands has been linked to enhanced export of chromophoric dissolved organic matter (cDOM) into lakes, reducing water clarity through ‘lake brownification’. In the Dehcho region (Northwest Territories, Canada), diatom (siliceous algae, Class Bacillariophyceae) assemblages in small, shallow lakes have been shown to be structured along a cDOM gradient, indicating that lake brownification can be inferred from subfossil diatoms in lake sediment cores. This thesis presents the results of a diatom-based paleolimnological study of a small, shallow Dehcho lake covering the last ~300 years. Results indicate a shift beginning circa ~1920s from epiphytic and large-sized diatom taxa characteristic of low cDOM lakes (Denticula kuetzingii, Navicula) towards increased abundance of Pseudostaurosira brevistriata and Stauroforma exiguiformis associated with higher cDOM. The timing of this shift coincided with an anomalous sediment geochemical signature potentially indicative of a drought or wildfire that likely initiated an accelerated loss of permafrost.
Access status: Open Access ,
Searching for Belonging and Living with Saudade: Emotional Geographies of Brazilian LGBTQ+ Migration to Canada
(2025-11-11) Martins Cavalcanti Furtado, Leonardo; Gilbert, Liette
Many LGBTQ+ Brazilians drastically remap their lives by emigrating to Canada, having often been denied place-making and the safe (re)production of their queer identities in their homelands. This research traces such northern geopolitical migration trajectories and seeks to understand them at the intersection of queer and emotional geographies. Particular attention is directed to interpreting the feeling of saudade, a cultural emotion specific to the Lusophone sphere. Drawing upon 14 semi-structured interviews, a focus group, and 29 photographs of objects that symbolize saudade, I operationalize the multi-scalar relations between the queer Brazilian body and the home, the nation, and transnational flows. The findings of this research outline those relationships, highlight spatially contingent and transforming othering processes, and explores the emotional processes that lead to a queer Brazilian diasporic identity of in-betweenness, physically in Canada, but oriented towards queer Brazil.
Access status: Open Access ,
Staging an Olympic Myth: Democracy and the 2010 Vancouver Olympics
(2025-11-11) Roberts, Jacob Clark; Wood, Patricia Burke
My research examines how the discursive articulations of the Vancouver Olympics contributes to a spatial order, explored through a theoretical framework informed by Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy. Rancière (1999) explores politics as an aesthetic, spatial exercise, radically framed through equality. An Olympics case study, employing this theoretical frame, invites an emancipatory method to fill in the gap of the post-political literature and critically assess my research question: what is the status of democracy in Vancouver during the Games bidding and preparations phase? Interviews with Olympic volunteers, protestors, a city councillor, and organizing committee members have articulated the Games and urban image through themes of inevitability of the Olympic event, via aestheticization of particular neoliberalized transit infrastructure. This thesis interrogates the politics of neoliberalization in Vancouver, how urban space is (re)produced undemocratically, and discursively investigates how common-sense statements about the city are constituted through non-violent means and lack a disciplinary command.
Access status: Open Access ,
Assessing the Impacts of Recent, Intense Permafrost Thaw Slumping on Lakes in the Mackenzie Delta Uplands, Northwest Territories, Canada
(2025-11-11) O'Hagan, Claire Madeleine; Thienpont, Joshua
The Western Canadian Arctic is warming at a rate much more rapid than the rest of the globe. As a result of the increasing temperatures, this is influencing the rate of permafrost thaw throughout the Arctic. One of the most dramatic features that develop from permafrost thaw are retrogressive thaw slump, which are rotational landslide features that develop along the shore of impacted lakes. The terrestrial material from the slump is transported to the adjacent lake, impacting the water quality and health of the lake. In the Mackenzie Delta, due to rapid increases in temperatures, the rate of slump growth as well as the size of slumps are increasing. Due to this increase in slump activity in the area, this research focuses on the impacts of intense retrogressive thaw slump activity in the Mackenzie Delta region. Using a paleolimnological and remote- sensing approach, this research aims to assess the impact that large, highly active slump activity has on the ecosystem of adjacent lakes. Sediment core data taken from highly active slumps in the area allow us to examine the impacts that the slump have on the aquatic environment by looking at the effects on carbon and mercury dynamics within the system. Remote sensing analysis of the slump affected lakes allow us to assess the trends in turbidity in both slump and non slump impacted lakes, to assess differences in the patterns. This research is important as temperatures are expected to continue to increase in the western Canadian Arctic, and as such understanding the effects continued warming is having on slump development and slump impacted lakes is critical for assessing the health of the lakes throughout the region.
Access status: Open Access ,
Paleolimnological Study of Chironomidae (Diptera) Assemblage Responses to Multiple Stressors in Lake Nipigon (Northwestern Ontario)
(2025-11-11) Adano, Randelle Cheyanna Ong; Korosi, Jennifer B.
Lake Nipigon is a large, deep lake in northwestern Ontario that has experienced over a century of environmental disturbance linked to hydroelectric development, mining, and climate change. This thesis applied paleolimnological methods to reconstruct historical chironomid assemblages and their responses to multiple stressors in nearshore areas, as limnological data for Lake Nipigon is only sparsely available. Core surveys conducted show generalist and moderately tolerant taxa that suggest moderately warm, vegetated, and nutrient-rich conditions in the nearshore areas, with generally favourable oxygen conditions. Chironomid subfossil assemblage changes in Gull Bay were relatively muted, while recent increases in the warm-adapted taxon Stempellina in South Bay suggest a response to warming in the nearshore environment. South Bay also documented declines in cold, oxygen-sensitive Heterotrissocladius grimshawi-type. This study established the first paleolimnological baseline for Lake Nipigon, which is intended to provide a foundation for future Indigenous-led lake monitoring efforts that reflect both western scientific and Indigenous knowledge systems.
Access status: Open Access ,
Assessing Spatial Patterns and Temporal Trends in Lake Response to Rapid Permafrost Thaw in the Scotty Creek Basin (Northwest Territories, Canada)
(2025-11-11) Coleman, Kristen Amelia; Korosi, Jennifer; Remmel, Tarmo
Aquatic ecosystems at the southern limit of permafrost are highly sensitive to climate warming, including dramatic alterations of the landscape resulting from thawing of permafrost. In the southern Northwest Territories (NT), permafrost is typically restricted to forested peat plateaus, that are elevated above the surrounding wetland complex. As mean annual air temperatures approach 0°C, permafrost thaw can result in collapsed peat plateaus and waterlogged trees. These landscape changes can alter the connections between water bodies and the amount of terrestrial organic matter that enters these ecosystems, potentially contributing to the “browning” of lakes. Understanding how lakes in the southern NT have been responding to the acceleration of permafrost degradation is challenged by the scarcity of monitoring records. The Scotty Creek basin, southern NT, is an ideal location to study linkages among shallow lake limnology, landscape hydrology, and landscape change in thawing permafrost peatlands as three decades of field research has provided a unique long-term perspective on watershed changes rarely available for remote regions. For this dissertation, paleolimnological methods were applied to indirectly reconstruct long-term environmental change, using chemical and biological proxy data preserved in lake sediments from lakes in or near the Scotty Creek basin. Modern diatom ecology was assessed to improve diatom-based paleolimnological inferences of changes over time, and applied in a multi-proxy paleolimnological approach to investigate regional lake ecosystem changes over the past few hundred years. Two key findings emerged from the research: (1) dissolved organic carbon (DOC) quality, rather than DOC quantity, was a key driver of spatio-temporal variability in lake change; and (2) most lakes experienced only modest changes despite the widespread prevalence of permafrost degradation. This research presents a necessary step for integrating lakes into the ecohydrological research network at the Scotty Creek Research Station.
Access status: Open Access ,
Death and Resistance: Queerness in the Face of Violence and Impunity in Guerrero, Mexico
(2025-11-11) Payne, William John; Hyndman, Jennifer
Mexico stands out as a place impacted by anti-queer/trans violence, and the state of Guerrero is the site of a disturbing iteration of such aggression. Recent political struggle for LGBTQ rights there has paralleled a dramatic increase in violence linked to organized crime, with significant impacts for sexual and gender minorities. While a small literature on anti-queer/trans violence in places experiencing political violence and armed conflict exists, it has ignored places where such violence links to organized crime, impunity, and state complicity. Furthermore, this literature has largely failed to engage with two other bodies of work: the study of gender-based violence and of sexuality in such contexts. This dissertation addresses these gaps. The methodological choices guiding this project are rooted in a rejection of a myopic anthropological lens based on tropes that Orientalize Mexico as a distant, other place engraved with patterns of desire tied to tourism and ‘endemic’ violence. Drawing on a poststructuralist feminist epistemology and guided by feminist, queer, and Latinx scholarship regarding geopolitics and transnationalism, this project takes a geographical and critical human rights approach that recognizes how feminicide and homonationalist narratives about Mexico link to this anti-queer/trans violence. A commitment to constructivist Grounded Theory ensures that theorization emerges from the research findings. Research tools include participant-observation, in-depth interviews with key informants with knowledge of anti-queer/trans violence, hemerographic (media) analysis, and an in-depth study of a visual archive of Pride events in Guerrero. This dissertation makes three arguments that contribute to a queer theory of violence: First, anti-queer/trans violence is an iteration of feminicide, formed through impunity. Second, anti-queer/trans violence is linked to the political violence of organized crime and related state impunity, which has produced a version of queer/trans activism that has a contradictory, even perverse relationship with the state. And third, the transnational dimensions of this violence established through continental geographies of power with linkages to organized crime, drug trafficking, tourism, extractive activities and geopolitical relationships, further sharpen the danger faced by queer and trans persons through the creation of what I call a sallyport, a sort of metaphorical enclosure that magnifies their vulnerability.
Access status: Open Access ,
Characterizing Boreal Forest Fire Disturbance Boundaries Through Space And Time In Ontario
(2025-07-23) Keshmiri, Nadia; Remmel, Tarmo K.
The Ontario boreal forest contains vast natural resources but is increasingly threatened by wildland fires, which are becoming more frequent and affecting larger areas due to climate change. In response, this thesis compares wildland fire boundaries derived from vegetation index slopes with those provided by BorealDB a newly developed database that compiles consistent disturbance maps from 1972 to the present. BorealDB includes various attribute combinations and an ensemble confidence measure that shows how often different data sources agree. By examining which attribute combinations produce fire boundaries that most closely match remote sensing data, this research offers practical guidance for BorealDB users on selecting the most reliable disturbance points for their analyses.
Access status: Open Access ,
From Caregiver to Personal Support Worker: Canada's Caregiver Programs and Labour Market Segmentation Among Filipina Women in Toronto
(2025-07-23) Pagaling, Nikki Mary; Kelly, Philip
The lowest rung of the Canadian healthcare system is occupied by those categorized as personal support workers (PSWs). Despite their important contributions to Canada’s healthcare system, this work is stigmatized, devalued and characterized by multiple dimensions of precarity. It is also a labour segment that is increasingly differentiated by gender, race, and citizenship, with Filipina immigrants accounting for 30% of immigrants in this workforce. Recent scholarship has drawn connections between Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) and the overrepresentation of Filipina immigrants in PSW roles. While these studies demonstrate how most caregiver migrants eventually transition out of caregiving, many remain in a narrow set of low-wage, “low-skilled” occupations, with PSW work emerging as a notable choice. By centering the experiences of Filipina PSWs in Toronto who migrated to Canada as live-in caregivers, this thesis explores how the caregiver-to-PSW pathway is constituted in the local labour market and within the lifeworlds of Filipina former caregivers. Using a feminist economic geography framework, this research calls attention to: 1) the social and institutional mechanisms that construct a pathway towards PSW labour; and 2) the racialized and gendered discourses that construct idealized PSW subjectivities and the ways in which they overlap with notions of Filipina identity. Key theoretical concepts include the social embeddedness of labour markets, embodiment and interpellation, and citizenship. I situate this research within the wider institutional landscape of Canada’s temporary migrant caregiver programs and the gendered politics of transnational labour migration in the Philippines to illustrate the context in which Filipina women come to view PSW work as a viable and suitable post-caregiver program career.
Access status: Open Access ,
Guano Rain and Growing Pain: Co-Nesting Dynamics of Double-Crested Cormorants and Black-Crowned Night-Herons at Tommy Thompson Park
(2025-07-23) Weiderick, Baillie Marie; Podur, Justin
This study investigates the co-nesting dynamics between double-crested cormorants (Nannopterum auritum) and black-crowned night-herons (Nycticorax nycticorax) in Tommy Thompson Park, Toronto, Canada, from 1992 to 2023. Linear mixed models with Bayesian inference were used to examine the impacts of cormorant abundance, nest density, management practices, and environmental factors on night-heron population growth. The strongest and only statistically significant relationship was a positive association between cormorant and night-heron growth indices. Results showed substantial uncertainty in the effects of most variables on night-heron growth indices, with wide credible intervals for nest densities, night-heron road proximity, and management activities. Nest densities of both species and proximity to roads had minimal effects on night-heron colony growth, with posterior means near zero. Management activities showed a slight positive but non-significant effect on night-herons. The study revealed that while cormorant population growth generally benefited night-herons, there was high uncertainty in parameter estimates, potentially due to small sample sizes and ecosystem complexity.
Access status: Open Access ,
Chronically Excluded? Public Toilet Access for Youth with Gastrointestinal Illnesses
(2025-07-23) Kiriazis, Stefanie; Bain, Alison
This thesis explores the intersection between public infrastructure, health and youth geographies, time geography, and sensuous and emotional embodiments to highlight public toilets as a critical yet often overlooked urban space. Through these intersections, this thesis not only spotlights public toilets as central nodes in everyday life, but also the differential ways these spaces impact populations who rely on them most for medical needs. Through a feminist methodological approach that employs semi-structured interviews and space-time diaries, this thesis asks: How do the daily mobility patterns of youth with chronic gastrointestinal illnesses depend on the spatial and temporal availability and accessibility of public and private toilet facilities? This thesis investigates the constraints to mobility and wellness that these individuals face when met with inadequate and inaccessible toilet infrastructure, with a case study in the Greater Toronto Area. Encompassing both suburbs and city centre, the research sample illustrates the infrastructural disparities between dense and sparse landscapes. From the ‘in-betweens’ from one toilet to the next, to the sensuous and emotional experiences felt within these spaces themselves, this research investigates how the everyday lifeworlds of chronically ill youth – through work, school, and play – can be enabled and disabled by the quality of infrastructure they are met with, and the coping mechanisms they employ to aid their journeys and experiences, attributing to overall wellness.
Access status: Open Access ,
An Immigrant Neighbourhood as a Site of Planetary Urbanization: The Case of St. James Town, Toronto
(2025-07-23) Formanowicz, Dominik Tadeusz; Mensah, Joseph
Immigration is a contested topic in a global reality defined by the spatiality of nation-states. However, in the case of South-North mobility, the public debate usually overlooks the role of colonial legacies and capitalist dependencies in shaping the patterns and trajectories of migration. On the scale of the Global North’s cities, narratives tend to revolve around the immigrant enclaves as problematic or dangerous. This dissertation informs the debate with a qualitative overview of the neighbourhood of St. James Town in Toronto, an area characterized by a strong immigrant presence. Analyzing the spatiality of immigrants on the scale of the nation-state, the city and the neighbourhood itself, it employs the conceptual framework of planetary urbanization to explain the role of newcomers as agents creating and maintaining global flows of capital and ideas, actively taking part in the production of space in Canada and far beyond it. At the same time, this work examines the spatiality of an immigrant enclave as an expression of a settler colonial nation-state, highlighting the vital role of spaces such as St. James Town in global and domestic patterns of precarity and exploitation. Portraying the neighbourhood in a dynamic moment of change, both in terms of infrastructural interventions as well as population structure, this dissertation highlights the resilience and community-formation skills of newcomers as well as the great cost of spatial and social adaptation. It also points out the shortcomings of the planetary urbanization concept, underscoring the necessity to include post-colonial criticisms and a nuanced, multi-faceted role of human mobility in explaining the works of global capitalism.
Access status: Open Access ,
Mining Networks In The Making: River Sand And Stone Mining In South Sulawesi, Indonesia
(2025-04-10) Medina De Loera, Wendy Alejandra; Vandergeest, Peter
This dissertation examines the factors and processes that have shaped sand and stone mining activities in the Jeneberang river, in South Sulawesi, Indonesia from the 1970s to 2022. My focus is the making of “mining networks” which, following Actor Network Theory, I frame as socio-material associations/processes that take provisional forms. Like other social scientific research on sand mining, I consider various political, economic and sociocultural aspects that shape who participates in mining, how and why. Additionally, I examine the material dimensions of both the geographical area that I study and the mined river materials to provide a spatially grounded analysis of the regional political economy of sand and stone mining in the Jeneberang river. I also analyze the actions that local people undertake to shape how mining happens so that they gain some benefits. Thus, this dissertation is grounded in terms of sociocultural dynamics and political economic processes but it is also place-based in terms of material features and changes. My research questions query how material and human factors shape mining networks and with what implications for local people and local mining businesses. To account for the agency of the material and people in shaping socio-material and political economic outcomes, I draw on a materiality approach and the moral economy framework. I combine insights from recent social scientific research on sand mining, critical resource geography’s focus on materiality, political ecology’s ideas on the relationship between materiality and resource access, political economy of mining’s focus on social mobilization and resistance processes, and the moral economy framework. I argue that material elements —including the river, water, sand, stones, topography— and human elements —such as the actions of local people— actively participate in a continuous shaping of mining networks. I also put forward the idea that mining networks can be better understood as “in the making” rather than as end products. The dissertation contributes to the sand mining literature which has generally approached the material aspects of mining settings as the contexts within which social phenomena unfold and has yet to further explore the actions of local people in shaping how mining happens.

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