MES Supervisors

Topics of Interest: Environmental ethics, worldviews, religion and environment, environmental epistemology, eco-anxiety

Description of Research Interests: My current research interest lies in understanding and utilizing pedagogies of hope that build resilience within students as they navigate paths toward sustainability.

Topics of Interest: Critical food pedagogy; local food/climate justice; urban food/climate justice; social movements 

Project Title and Description: Toward Sustainable Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture for Net-Zero Food Systems

I am looking for students to join a dynamic interdisciplinary team collaborating on a multi-year project funded through a SSHRC Sustainable Agricultural Research Initiative grant titled “Toward Sustainable Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture for Net-Zero Food Systems”. The successful applicants will join the Master of Environment & Sustainability (MES) program, in the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto.

Our work will focus on examining pedagogical strategies and interventions that explicitly support food systems re-localization and food justice within our study area (the Greater Toronto Area). This will include investigating how/where/what we learn about our local food system in various settings, from the field to classroom, and points in between.

Successful applicants will receive a competitive research stipend, and modest budgets for research costs and costs related to conference travel to present project results. Ideally applicants will have an undergraduate degree in food studies, human geography, urban studies, environmental studies, or a related field. I am particularly interested in applications from students from equity-deserving groups, including those with lived experience relevant to the project.

Topic of Interest: Coastal sea level shifts

Project Description: This project will investigate shifts in water and heat fluxes that drive shifts in coastal sea level. For example, shifts in coastal precipitation can drive shifts in the freshwater accumulating in a coastal ocean area, or it can drive shifts in seawater salinity, and both of these can cause coastal sea level to adjust to a new state.  

Topics of Interest: climate change communication; climate change journalism; environmental media; climate justice activism and social media; media, democracy, and climate change

Description of Research Interests: My research concentrates on the climate-media-democracy nexus and explores questions of power, identity-formation, and meaning-making around climate change. I'm primarily interested in supervising students who are interested in researching climate change media through critical methods of analysis. 

Topics of Interest: Indigenous science, Indigenous environmental studies, STS, environmental justice 

Project Title: Indigenous and anti-colonial approaches to pollution and chemical risk

Topics of Interest: Extreme Weather Events, Human Health, Human Well-being, Impact Evaluation, Implementation Science, Nature Conservation, Planetary Health

Project Title and Description: Investigating and strengthening the roles of forests in resilience to the health impacts of extreme weather events in the Global South

Climate and environmental changes are increasingly driving rapid social disruption across the globe, with disproportionate adverse impacts on marginalized communities. Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (e.g., droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires, cyclones). Through food and income provisioning, water filtration, and other benefits, ecosystems (e.g., forests) can support resilience to, and recovery from, environmental shocks (e.g., extreme weather events). The world’s natural ecosystems, however, have been degraded at an increasing pace and extent. These changes to the world’s climate and environment interact in complex ways to impact human health and well-being, particularly of Global South communities. This research project has two related components:

1) We will integrate data on global weather, forest condition, and demographic and health surveys and use impact evaluation approaches (causal inference) to investigate the roles of forests in shaping resilience to the impacts of extreme weather events on human health and nutrition outcomes across multiple Global South countries; 2) To complement and nuance the multi-country findings with local communities’ perspectives, we will explore nexus of environmental degradation, climate change, and human health in southern Madagascar using a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, and implementation research and impact evaluation. We will examine the impacts of climate change-induced droughts in southern Madagascar on child nutrition and mental health in marginalized communities. We will also explore how the droughts affect local use of community managed forest resources and how these resources moderate nutrition and mental health outcomes. Finally, we will develop a transdisciplinary approach that integrates community nutrition and forest conservation programs to address the effects of the droughts on nutritional and mental health while delivering conservation benefits.

Topics of Interest: urban sustainability; urban climate action; knowledge co-production; backcasting 

Project Titles: Visionary Communities: exploring sustainble futures in the Kingstrton-Galloway-Orton Park (KGO) community in Scarborough; Scaliing deep energy retrofits in Toronto; Electric Power Planning in Ontario

Topics of Interest: Worldviews and ecology, religion and ecology, environmental ethics, etc.

Topics of Interest: non-exhaust traffic-related emissions, metal emissions and human health in an urban context

Topics of Interest: Faith-based environmentalism (e.g., environmental action in places of worship, Greening of Religion Hypothesis, Data-driven Approaches to Measuring the Greening of Religion, environmental declarations, Jewish environmentalism, etc.), faith-based environmental ethics, religio-legal approaches to environmental protection