Environmental Studies

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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.
Open Access
SUBSUMPTION AS DEVELOPMENT: A WORLD-ECOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF THE SOUTH KOREAN "MIRACLE"
(2022-03-03) Gibson, Kyle Andrew; Kipfer, Stefan Andreas
This work offers a critical reinterpretation of South Korean "economic development" from the perspectives of Marxian form critique and Jason Moore's world-ecology. Against the "production in general" view of economic life that dominates the extant debates, it analyzes the rise, spread, and deepening of capitalism's historically specific social forms in twentieth-century (South) Korea: commodity, wage-labor, value, and capital. Eschewing the binary language of development and underdevelopment, we adopt Marx's non-stagist distinctions regarding the relative degree of labor's (and society's) subsumption under capital: hybrid, formal, and real. Examining the (South) Korean experience across three dialectically interrelated scales – regional, global, and "national" – we outline the historical-geographical contingency surrounding South Koreas emergence by c.1980 as a regime of (industrialized) real subsumption, one of the only non-Western societies ever to do so. Crucial to this was the generalization of commodification and proletarianization that betokened deep structural changes in (South) Korea's class structure, but also a host of often-mentioned issues such as land reform, foreign aid, the developmental state, and a "heaven sent" position within the US-led Cold War order. Despite agreeing on the importance of these latter factors, however, the conclusions we draw from them differ radically from those of the extant analyses. For although regimes of real subsumption are the most materially, socially, and technologically dynamic, they are also the most socio-ecologically unsustainable and alienating due to the dualistic tensions inherent to capital's "fully developed" forms, in particular the temporal grounding of value. US protestations about the generalizability of these relations aside, moreover, these regimes have always been in the extreme minority and, crucially, have depended on less developed societies for their success. Historically, this has been achieved through widening the net of capitalist value relations; however, four decades of neoliberalization has all but eliminated any further large-scale "frontier strategies" of this sort. Due to its relatively dense population vis-a-vis its geographical size, contemporary South Korea faces stark challenges that render it anything but a model of "sustainable development," but rather signal the growing anachronism of value as the basis for regulating the future of nature-society relations in the "developed world" and beyond.
Open Access
Assessing the Benefits, Challenges and Scientific Value of Community Science Programs: A Case Study Using Bumble Bee Watch
(2022-03-03) MacPhail, Victoria Joy; Colla, Sheila R.
We are experiencing a biodiversity crisis but resources to help species are limited. Scientists are turning to community science to complement traditional scientific methods. Bumble bees (Bombus spp.) are important pollinators in temperate regions, but many are in decline, and more information is needed to conserve them. The Bumble Bee Watch (BBW) program collects this through photos submitted by volunteers and identified by experts. Yet many community science programs struggle. Chapter 2 reviews common successes and challenges, offering best practices for developing and running programs. To determine whether BBW is filling knowledge gaps, Chapter 3 compares its data to the Bumble Bees of North America database (BBNA) over all years and 2010-2020. BBW recorded 41 species (BBNA had 48) from all parts of the continental US and Canada, confirmed persistence, and provided novel locations for species outside of and within the known extent of occurrence. BBW showed its greatest impact from 2010-2020 by contributing 25% of all records, 28% of all unique locations, and 32% new plant forage genera. BBW does not replace traditional surveys, but does complement them. Chapter 4 shows that B. pensylvanicus is critically endangered in Canada according to IUCN Red List criteria. BBW provided 20% of all B. pensylvanicus records and 36% of its sites over the 2007-2016 period assessed, and thus provided important information on its current abundance and distribution. No experience is required to participate in BBW, but having participants able to accurately identify species is beneficial. Chapter 5 explores the percent agreement and veracity of participant species identifications compared to experts, with the average being 53% and 56%, respectively. With better educational resources, participants may be better trained to identify species more accurately. Understanding the motivations and insights of community science participants is important. Chapter 6 discusses the results of a BBW user and expert survey: participants want to contribute to science and save the bees, and report an increase in knowledge and skills after participating. Although areas for improvement are noted, BBW is an important tool for Bombus researchers, and demonstrates the value that community science has for species conservation.
Open Access
Irresistible Revolution: Black, Trans, and Disabled World-Making through Activist Portraiture
(2022-03-03) Ware, Syrus; Myers, Lisa; da Silveira Gorman, Rachel
This practice-based dissertation project engages large-scale portraiture to confront and resist the fungibility of Blackness. The project comprises a selection of twenty drawings and an exegesis in which I analyze my aesthetic process in order to shed light on theoretical problems and gaps in Trans, Disability, Black studies and activisms. This collection of writing also discusses and presents activist struggle, white supremacy in the arts, abolitionist organizing and speculative futures. These theoretical explorations are supported by reflections on the collaborative creation process and the ways in which the portraits have been received. To this end, I have included interviews I conducted with the portrait subjects and through textual analysis of ways in which the portraits have been taken up in art and activist contexts. I argue that studying and supporting Black disabled activist practice can inform ways forward for disability arts in the Canadian milieu.
Open Access
Multiscalar Toxicities: Mapping Environmental Injustice in and Beyond the Nail Salon
(2021-11-15) Shadaan, Reena Kaur; Scott, Dayna N.
The dissertation attends to the entanglement of toxicities at multiple temporal and spatial scales from bodies to workplaces to homes to communities as well as across generations. This work centers the nail salon a site of potential environmental and occupational health harms due to routine exposure to toxicants, labour exploitation, and verbal and other abuses. These hazards are rooted in structural inequities that position immigrant-settler women of colour in precarious and dangerous work environments as well as have broader roots in global structures of extraction. The dissertation employs multiple methods grounded in feminist methodologies, centering the experiential and embodied knowledges of 37 Toronto-based nail technicians through occupational health mapping – a worker-centered visual method that maps workplace hazards and potential solutions. While there is growing scholarship on occupational harm in the nail salon context, this work differs in that it positions the nail salon in relation to broader structural violences. This is in contrast to framings of harm that are body-bound, body-centric, or a result of our individual "choices." This analysis reveals that dangerous workplace conditions – rooted in the racialized and gendered manifestations of capitalist exploitation – are embedded in/on workers' bodies and impact their abilities to enact relations of care with kin. The toxicants that harm nail technicians health find their material and symbolic roots in the colonial, gendered, and environmental violence of petroleum extraction and petrochemical production. These processes manifest corporeal-level and community-wide intergenerational harm. To approach and link these multiple scales of violence, this work puts forth an expanded conception of environmental justice (EJ) – one that conceptually and methodologically rejects the politics of borders, such as between bodies, work, and home; between those deemed "unwelcome" and those welcomed, and; between nodes in the commodity chain. Following Pellow's (2018) Critical Environmental Justice approach, to limit manifestations of environmental racism, sexism, and violence to certain "sacrifice zones" conceals the extent and reach of the violence; it perpetuates erasure. Embodied and local manifestations of harm in the nail salon are one node in a broad and interrelated web of gendered violences fueled by extractive logics. While centering workers' voices and the nail salon environment, this dissertation traces the interrelations of different spatial and temporal scales of violence, demonstrating that environmental harms are expansive, interconnected, and warrant broadened solidarities. As violence is multiscalar, so is resistance. While liberal environmental health campaigns tout body-centric "solutions," nail technicians' resistance to racial and gendered manifestations of capitalist exploitation occur at multiple scales – the molecular, the interpersonal, and the collective. To look beyond the nail salon demands broadened relations of solidarity – ones that transcend both space and time.
Open Access
Towards an Ecological Macroeconomics: Linking Energy and Climate in a Stock-Flow Consistent Input-Output Framework
(2021-11-15) Sers, Martin Robert; Victor, Peter Alan
This dissertation examines the development of a stock-flow consistent input-output (SFCIO) model in continuous time and its applications to energy analysis and climate change at the macroeconomic level. The approach used in the dissertation is to explore the SFCIO model via the development of a sequence of progressively more detailed models. The first portion of the dissertation is concerned with the analysis of several key problems: first, the integration of physical quantities (energy and power) with macroeconomic variables and the issue of dimensional analysis; second, the introduction of physically determined investment equations; third, the modelling of endogenous prices as physical market clearing mechanisms; and fourth, the presentation of an overall model calibration scheme based on a life-cycle net energy approach. The second portion of the dissertation presents a sequence of energy transition models designed to explore the dynamics of economies attempting both a transition in how energy is generated (from fossil-fuels to renewables), and how energy is used (the electrification of end use). Using scenario and sensitivity analysis, the conditions under which economies succeed or fail at generating emissions trajectories consistent with a 1.5-degree target are explored. A three sector (renewable, fossil-fuel, and manufacturing) energy transition integrated assessment model is developed that includes endogenous depletion-based fossil-fuel EROI, an endogenous energy storage based renewable EROI, and climate interactions via coupling with the BEAM carbon cycle model and a two-component energy balance model. This is further extended to incorporate trade dynamics under assumptions of capital mobility and immobility. A principal finding of this work is that, assuming no large-scale deployment of negative emissions technologies, the only conditions under which an SFCIO modelled economy can achieve emissions trajectories consistent with a 1.5 degree target is immense up-front investment in renewables and a rapid rate of decommissioning and replacing non-electrified capital with electrified capital and that degrowth alleviates the magnitude of these requirements.
Open Access
Housing policy, design, and struggle: The colonial production of space of Israel/Palestine, one new city at a time
(2021-07-06) Haas, Oded; Kipfer, Stefan Andreas; Gilbert, Liette
Housing policy and housing design have a long history as instruments of colonial domination in Israel and as strategies for shaping the Jewish state as such. This thesis examines how a housing crisis framework, including local struggles for the right to housing, may be utilised by the Israeli Zionist regime to counter insurgent practices of Palestinians in the country and simultaneously appropriated for the Palestinian national struggle. The thesis originally compares state planning by Israel and by the Palestinian Authority: a state-initiated plan for an Arab city in Israel, Tantour, and a privatised Palestinian housing development in the West Bank, Rawabi. This comparison enables me to explore how local solutions to the housing crisis shape and recast colonial relations in Israel/Palestine, seen from the perspective of the colonised. The study focuses on a struggle by a group of Palestinian activists in the Tantour case who are fighting to shape the new Arab city according to local housing needs and to incorporate it in their towns jurisdiction. Their struggle is examined in comparison to a small group of Palestinian citizens of Israel who chose to obtain homeownership in Rawabi in the West Bank. I deploy mixed methods designed to explore urban space as co-produced by state power and inhabitants. Among these: a critical review of planning documents, site visits, and in-depth interviews with planners and inhabitants. Foregrounding the narratives of Palestinian citizens of Israel, I argue that neoliberal solutions to the housing crisis are changing the relationship between Palestinian sumud praxis, meaning resistance by remaining on the land, and the Zionist colonial strategy of Judaising space. In both cases I discover how Palestinian sumud has found new ways to endure in neoliberal times. The case of Rawabi in the West Bank sheds light on homeownership as a new mode of remaining and helps to place the Tantour case in Israel on a spectrum of sumud that ranges from individual economic resilience to collective anti-colonial struggle. Thus, I offer a conceptualisation of the right to housing as a struggle to de-colonise housing, and advocate for a case-based, grounded theorisation of the housing crisis itself. The thesis makes a substantial contribution to scholarship of settler-colonialism, to the study of the political geography of Israel/Palestine, and to developing a critical agenda in housing studies.
Open Access
Nature, Self, and Being in the World: Revealing a Flourishing Ethics in Landscape Architecture through Poignant Landscape Experiences
(2021-07-06) Diep, Van Thi; Taylor, Laura E.
Poignant landscapes are gateways to our existential belongingness because they allow us to be moved by the world. Landscape architects have the potential to shape the worlds landscapes, as settings for poignant life experiences, and yet, an issue lies in the praxis of the profession. Contemporary landscape architecture and environmental ethics, as part of contemporary society, are enmeshed in binary narratives. Because interpretations of landscapes are inseparable from notions of nature, which hermeneutically carry existential stories of human-world relationships, when an enigmatic natural world was abandoned for the objectivity of biology and space, the worldview of landscapes also split into binary narratives of human versus nature, sacred versus profane, and poetic versus practical. Moreover, with the expansion of secularism and nondualist cosmologies such as Daoism and Indigenous teachings into the Western world, polarised moral judgements, which are loosely based on past Christian narratives, become paradoxical and unsupportive towards resolving contemporary social and ecological disputes. Therefore, this project argues for an approach to ethics based on the idea of flourishing, which sees morality as relational and that ethical individuals make autonomous choices to flourish within a world of social and ecological systems. To return to the roots of being, this research asks landscape architects what a flourishing life and a flourishing environment really means to them. Poignant experiences with landscapes are used to provoke memory and awareness of being in the world and the sense of connectivity with other existences in the human, ecological, or spiritual worlds. Through the analysis of professional codes and mandates, a survey of landscape architects, and interviews with flourishing landscape architects, the research explores how the landscape architect, as a professional identity and as an archetype in the collective consciousness, is interpreted, performed, and communicated in landscape architecture. A hermeneutic approach was used to unravel concepts of nature, landscape, experience, poignancy, and ethical choice-making. The analysis reveals that a reflexive process that is simultaneously personal and collective can increase experiential awareness, expand horizons for meanings, and create opportunities for shifting paradigms essential to achieving a sense of human belongingness in the world.
Open Access
The Financialization of Housing as a Growth Model: New Property Relations and Massive Suburbanization in Toronto/Brampton and Istanbul/Gktrk
(2021-07-06) Ucoglu, Murat; Keil, Roger H.
The financialization of housing has become a crucial discussion point since the financial crisis of 2008. This dissertation aims at focusing on the financialization of housing in the Greater Toronto Area and Istanbul Metropolitan Area. While the existing literature tends to describe the financialization of housing as the increasing impact of finance capital on the production of space, in this dissertation I argue that the financialization of housing appears as an economic growth model that transforms the socio-economic conditions of households at least in certain countries. The dissertation examines the cases of Brampton in GTA and Gktrk in IMA (Istanbul Metropolitan Area) in order to underline the ongoing property relations and the rise of suburban-financial nexus as an economic growth model. The financialization of housing occurs in many different forms in different countries. In certain countries it appears as a simple dynamic of the housing market, i.e. it is just a matter of mortgage credits and the banking system linked to the global financial investments. In certain countries, it appears as the financialization of rental housing systems (e.g. Germany), and in certain countries it appears as the dominance of finance capital in order to speculate the investments in securities. In fact, the financialization of housing began to become the dominant economic growth model in certain countries. Canada and Turkey can be examined as the economies that pursue the strategy of using the financialization of housing as a boosting tool for economic growth. In these two countries, the real estate market and its connection to the financial flows have become the key growth engine of the economy. In this dissertation, I examine how in these two countries, the financialization of housing has become the leading economic growth strategy and how this process transforms the cities. The cases in this dissertation aims at contributing to this argument by going into details of how finance capital transforms the socio-spatial reality.
Open Access
Risky Beeswax: Artistic Responses to the Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS
(2021-03-08) Zealley, John Kenneth Andrew; Sandilands, Catriona A. H.
In my dissertation, I examine risk in relation to HIV/AIDS and queer art and sex; and the problem that industrial mitigations of risk pose to sexually active queer men living with HIV, the kinds of sex they want, and the people they fuck in the era of AIDS industry. I explore this problem through four themes that emerged during my interviews with artists whose practices respond to AIDS and/or queer sex: 1) risking the personal; 2) (radical, ludic, and risky) sexual ecologies; 3) AIDS, its intersections and risky representations; and 4) the role of risk in art and artistic practice. I also use methods of participant comprehension, sensory ethnography, participant sensing, and artistic practice. The role of the interviews in helping me select the themes shaped my theoretical conversation and the three interventions that comprise my dissertation: audio, video, and written. Industrial mitigations of risk fetishize HIV status and HIV criminalization in ways that stigmatize queer and HIV-positive sexual practices, communities, and cultures. Riskas idea and practiceis multidimensional and has been important in HIV/AIDS art/activism since long before AIDS industrialization. I talk about biopolitics and respond to disciplinary- and bio-power through Foucaults concept of pastoral power and his politics of aesthetic self-creation. I understand (and use) risk as a response to hetero- and homo-normative codes, laws, and imperatives. As a ludic counternarrative to homonormativity, I explore constellations of risky sexual and artistic practices as sites of self-creation through the concept of a dynamic continuum of risk that documents, across four decades of AIDS, the outlaw risky sex practices (anonymous, bathhouses, cruising, public sex) that have thrived in every era. I use this concept as a way to understand a collection of practices that argue against industrial mitigations of risk and the normative and gentrifying impacts these mitigations produce: communities of banality and compliance. Through examination and material production of art that responds to risk in AIDS and queer creative and sexual practices, I conclude that practices and processes of making and responding to art create an escape from the precarity of sexual marginalization, homonormativity, and gentrification.