Assistant Professor / Geography and Environmental Studies / TMU
Indigenous studies, settler colonialism, environmental justice, climate change, grassroots activism, Indigenous sovereignty, resource extraction and infrastructure, food studies, queer Indigenous feminism, decolonizing methodologies.
ES8957 Anti-Colonial Methodologies
(graduate)
TMU: Winter 2023
Can research be decolonized? As the university responds to calls for justice and action in response to Indigenous dispossession, anti-Black racism, and other current issues, graduate students are at the very beginning of their research journeys. We know that our research can harm as well as help, and the communities we work with often have a complicated and even adversarial relationship to research. We consider the risks and rewards of researching in marginalized communities, and the tensions that may arise when we are members of those communities ourselves. We look to decades of writing on anti-colonial theory and methodologies to build a new canon for engaged research. This course will help guide students toward more equitable, ethical, and justice-focused research by considering the topics of intersectionality, decolonization, reciprocity, relationality, comradeship, and Indigenous methodologies.
GEO711 An Indigenous Guide to the Apocalypse
(undergraduate)
TMU: Winter 2023
FNTI: Fall 2022
Indigenous peoples have faced a prior and continuing apocalypse, with the genocidal impacts of colonization now compounding the effects of global climate change. This course asks what histories and futures of Indigenous survival may teach us about adaptation, migration, and resurgence at a time of perceived crisis. Using theories of Indigenous relationality, collaboration, and self-reflection, we will build a practice-based community approach to climate change adaptation and survival at the end of the world.
GEO555 Colonial Infrastructures in North America
(undergraduate)
TMU: Fall 2021, Fall 2022
FNTI: Winter 2022
This course considers the ways in which colonial power is produced, built, managed, and perpetuated through state and industry infrastructures. In North America, where colonialism is enacted through settlement and continued occupation of Indigenous lands, landscapes continue to be transformed to serve the interests of the settler state. How do Indigenous peoples imagine and relate to the land differently than settler governments? How do conflicts over infrastructure projects, land, and resources illuminate colonial power dynamics? What are the physical structures that produce settler colonialism and white possession and how can we understand them geographically? This course moves through multiple infrastructures to answer these questions, with a particular focus on historical and current projects to build railways, highways, dams, pipelines. We will end the course by considering how border infrastructures re-inscribe colonial ownership, and how Indigenous people continue to re-assert sovereignty on Indigenous lands.
GEO509 Food, Place and Identity
(undergraduate)
TMU: Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Winter 2022
This course examines the role of place, race, and politics in the food system. In defining the geography of food as who eats what where and why, it considers how food's importance extends beyond mere nourishment; food is an idiom that provides individual and collective comfort and identity. However impoverished or affluent, contemporary cuisines are legacies of military conflict, colonization and commercial influence that have incorporated key, non-indigenous products that were introduced by the Columbian Exchange.