Broadly, my research explores cities, the environment, and social justice at multiple scales through a lens of urban political ecology and critical urban studies. Much of my research has examined the intersection between urban agriculture (UA) movements in the US and Canada, food systems policy and planning, and the specific urban political economies and historical geographies in which they arise. I also work on green gentrification and environmental justice issues, particularly as they relate to historical land uses and racialized planning processes. I conduct both applied and theoretically engaged research using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods. In doing so, I hope to innovate urban environmental and food systems research on a theoretical level by drawing attention to social processes, notably to "everyday" politics and governance and their relationship to formal policy, planning, and the broader political economy, and how these relations articulate with and work through race, class, and gender within the broader historical-geographic context of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Ongoing and past projects include:
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De manière générale, mes recherches explorent les villes, l'environnement et la justice sociale à de multiples échelles à travers le prisme de l'écologie politique urbaine et des études urbaines critiques. Beaucoup de mes recherches ont porté sur l'intersection entre les mouvements d'agriculture urbaine (AU) aux États-Unis et au Canada, les politiques et la planification des systèmes alimentaires, ainsi que les économies politiques urbaines spécifiques et les géographies historiques dans lesquelles ils s'inscrivent. Je travaille également sur les questions de gentrification verte et de justice environnementale, notamment en ce qui concerne les utilisations historiques des terres et les processus de planification racialisés. Je mène des recherches à la fois appliquées et théoriques en utilisant une variété de méthodes qualitatives et quantitatives. Ce faisant, j'espère innover la recherche sur l'environnement urbain et les systèmes alimentaires à un niveau théorique en attirant l'attention sur les processus sociaux, notamment sur la politique et la gouvernance "quotidiennes" et leur relation avec la politique formelle, la planification et l'économie politique au sens large, et sur la manière dont ces relations s'articulent avec la race, la classe et le genre et fonctionnent à travers eux dans le contexte historique et géographique plus large du colonialisme et du capitalisme racial. Les projets en cours et passés incluent:
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Building on an INRS and VRM-funded pilot study on greenhouses in Inuit Nunangat, my colleague Magalie Quintal-Marineau and I were awarded a SSHRC Insight grant to expand the project to address food security and food sovereignty initiatives more broadly, with the goal of understanding their emergence in relation to a suite of interrelated factors, including urbanization, climate change, resource extraction, reconciliation, and Inuit self-determination. Our partners include the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Human Services. The project brings into dialogue geographic literature on governance and Indigenous food sovereignty and contributes to a 'critical Northern geography' of food governance. Two main objectives guide the research:
1.To scope and characterize the formal governance (discourses and practices) of food security in Inuit Nunangat. Through archival work, interviews and workshops we aim to a) document the diverse institutional actors and networks involved in food's formal governance across Inuit Nunangat; b) identify the dominant discourses these institutional actors have used to frame food security; c) compare and contrast the discourses and practices promoted by these institutional actors, and evaluate their alignment with priorities laid out in the Inuit Nunangat Food Security Strategy (INFSS); d) characterize how food has been instrumentalized (discursively and programmatically) in Nunavik to serve a diversity of potentially conflicting goals (e.g., economic development, resource extraction, national security, reconciliation, Inuit self-determination). 2.To understand, document, and 'story' the everyday governance of food in Nunavik. Using participatory methodologies, including youth & elders storytelling sessions, we aim to a) examine how formal discourses and practices are interpreted, adopted, adapted, and/or refused by community-based organizations and Inuit; b) understand food's relation to land and well-being; c) document how these everyday practices contribute to "a self-determined and sustainable food system in Inuit Nunangat that reflects Inuit societal values, supports Inuit well-being, and ensures Inuit access to affordable, nutritious, safe, and culturally preferred foods" (as defined in INFSS); d) examine how spaces of encounter between Inuit youth & elders inform and shape the everyday governance of food and affirm Inuit food sovereignty. |
My colleague at INRS Sophie Van Neste, Olivier Riffon (UQAC), and I are co-leading a three-year project funded by Ouranos and Mitacs that addresses equity in climate adaptation initiatives in Quebec. While climate change adaptation is crucial, there are concerns that such efforts may exacerbate existing inequalities in various ways: unequal distribution of their effects (distributive justice), disparity of opportunities, capacities and effects of participation (procedural justice), and incomplete and unequal recognition of diverse knowledges and experience and of various intersectional forms of oppression and discrimination. Working with researchers across Quebec (INRS, U Laval, UQAT, UQAC, CEGEP de Rivière-du-Loup) and community partners, the goal of the project is to bring together a wide range of knowledge and experience through a living lab co-produce an equity toolkit for climate change adaptation. Central to the project is the documentation and dissemination of stories and testimonials of people affected by climate change.
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I'm working with a large team of researchers from INRS, Université de Montréal, McGill,and Western University on a $6.5M project funded by Genome Quebec led by Louise Hénault-Éthier (INRS) and Joan Laur (UdeM) to assess the potential development of a circular economy cluster to cycle agri-food waste into fertilizer. Agriculture, food waste and waste management generate more CO2 than all the cars, trucks, trains, and boats in Canada. Emerging circular approaches are mitigating green house gasses (GHGs) by using composting, mushrooms, and edible insect bioreactors to transform urban agri-food waste into food or fertilizers. Microorganisms in the bioreactors affect the digestibility of agri-food residues, GHGs, and how the by-products improve soil and crop health. In a unique urban living laboratory, this project will use ‘omics technologies to better determine the key microbial consortia present in these agroecosystems and their interaction during biodegradation and production of food and by-products. Connecting different bioconversion processes with different feedstocks and waste streams, the research team will develop tools and models for bioconversion monitoring and optimization, multi-omics databases and microbial collections useful for development of products, strains, or microbial consortia. The creation of an urban circular agri-food cluster will improve the connectivity, efficiency, and efficacy of circular production of alternative whole foods and protein sources while mitigating GHG emissions and food insecurity. I'll be co-leading the team evaluating social and political obstacles to developing and scaling up such agri-food waste circular economy clusters. Read more about the project here.
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Compost Contested: An Urban Political Ecology of Municipal Organic Waste Governance in Montreal (2021 - 2024)
That the management of municipal waste is a terrain of political contestation is not new. How waste politics unfold – and how waste is governed, more broadly – within the context of municipal climate policy and the development of a circular economy, however, needs further examination. Previous research has attributed Montréal’s persistent failures to reduce and recycle its organic waste to consumer preferences, to the complexity of coordinating the metropolitan region's 100+ municipalities, or to community opposition to facilities siting, but a more nuanced approach considering multiple factors is needed to understand why organic waste management remains such a trenchant problem. Engaging with critical debates in geography on waste, green development and the circular economy, and urban governance, this SSHRC Insight Development project (2021 - 2023) is guided by two broad theoretical goals: 1) to understand the ways in which ‘formal’ municipal waste management policies, plans, and the ‘everyday’ practices and conceptions of Montrealers shape each other; and 2) to illuminate how conceptions and definitions of ‘waste’, as well as its physical properties, shape how it is ‘governed’. I'm working with master's students Gina Morris and doctoral student Logan Penvern on this project.
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“Compost – In 3 Acts”, a video made for Das Kompost Festival – Die lebendige Kunst der Transformation, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster, Germany, 16 – 25 Jun 2022.
I also made this short 3-minute audio story based on the research project for a podcasting course I took from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism's Advanced Media Institute.
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An area of theoretical interest more than a research project in and of itself, this is a theme that straddles several of my research projects. I organized a set of sessions for the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers with Anne Bonds (UW Milwaukee) and Ted Rutland (Concordia University) on the intersections of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and processes of urban development. Originally scheduled for the 2020 meeting in Seattle and postponed to April 2021, we hosted two excellent sets of papers on Property/Value and Development/Blues/Resurgence, and a panel on Reflections/Visions. I then organized a pair of panels "Settler Colonial Urbanisms: Convergences, DIvergences, and Limits" with David Hugill (Carleton University) and my colleague at INRS Stéphane Guimont Marceau for the Institute of Australian Geographers and New Zealand Geographical Society Combined Meeting in July 2021. Stéphane and I put together a Debates & Interventions section for Urban Geography based on the sessions, featuring eight contributions from a stellar group of scholars. To date, I've also published an article in Geography Compass, entitled Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler-colonial city, and a book chapter in The New Urban Ruins, entitled Nullius no more? Valorising vacancy through urban agriculture in the settler-colonial 'green city', which connect this theme to my work on urban agriculture and green gentrification.
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A collaboration between social scientists, environmental scientists, and engineers, CommunoSerre is an INRS-funded interdisciplinary project focusing on the social and technical challenges and possibilities of incorporating community and/or social economy greenhouses in the neighbourhoods hit hardest by the pandemic in Montréal. Greenhouses are often promoted as a silver bullet for year-round food production in cold climates, but as social scientists have explained for decades, food insecurity is function of poverty and purchasing power than of proximity and production. Are greenhouses the way to go? What do community members think? What is the risk of contributing to green gentrification? What are the possibilities for contributing to food justice and food security? And on the technical side, can they be integrated into the existing built environment and heated using energy captured from other structures? How can their efficiency be improved and GHG emissions reduced? How can they be built in a way that is low-cost and affordable? I'm co-leading the project with Jasmin Raymond (INRS-ETE), with the collaboration of Sophie Van Neste (INRS-UCS), Geneviève Bordeleau (INRS-ETE), Louis-César Pasquier (INRS-ETE), Didier Haillot (ÉTS), Danielle Monfet (ÉTS), and Éric Duchemin (AU/LAB). Doctoral students Caroline Flory-Célini and Sugir Selliah and master's student Sophie Lavoie took the lead on the social aspects of the project, and Dr. Chantal Gailloux authored the final report and toolkit. Here's an interview in La Presse about the project, another in Québec Science, an interview on CKIA 88.3fm Radio Urbaine's Québec, reveille!, and a discussion about the project on Radio-Canada's On va se le dire.
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Listen to Viviane Barnett tell the story of Green Fingers during First Lady Pat Nixon's visit to Portland on June 16th, 1969.
Photos courtesy of The Oregonian. Recording courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum. |
I collaborated on a community-based participatory research project called RESTING SAFE, which examined environmental justice issues in rest areas (or encampments) for houseless individuals. The project brought together houseless community leaders from two communities – one in Portland and one in Baltimore – and activist-researchers to investigate and intervene in environmental hazards in the places where houseless people are building homes. The goal of the project was to provide houseless communities with information about their sites' precise types and levels of pollution, and a toolkit to help community members reduce risks themselves, or to push government agencies to do so. A storymap of one site in Portland, Hazelnut Grove, is in the works, as are a couple of articles on 'citizen science' and land use history as a method. It was an honor to working with an amazing team that includes several former students on this project, funded by the Antipode Foundation and NSF.
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Funded by the climatology research institute Ouranos and the Institut National de Santé Publique du Québec, this project complements my work in Portland and Vancouver. My colleagues Éric Duchemin (AU/LAB) and Hiên Pham (UQÀM) and I investigated UA's potential contributions to climate change adaptation in five municipalities in Metropolitan Montreal. Building on my methodological approach with the NSF project, the 3-year project, entitled "Agriculture urbaine comme infrastructure verte de résilience", integrated mapping, surveys, and interviews to assess UA's socio-spatial variability across the region and its contributions to household food consumption. Read the final report and a BD/comic strip summary of the research in French and English illustrated by Mélika Bazin. See our article in Applied Geography.
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This project focused on the relationship between UA policy, practice, and political economy, with particular attention to the ways in which UA is entangled in processes of gentrification and investment in the “sustainable city”, and the role of UA advocates in policymaking forums. Funded by the National Science Foundation, I collaborated with Eugene McCann and Christiana Miewald at Simon Fraser University on a series of reports, maps, chapters, and articles presenting the results of our comparative study (2015-2020) of these processes in Portland, OR and Vancouver, BC. An article in IJURR rethinks urban agriculture governance based on our findings, and an article in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers lays out the some of the theoretical framework for understanding green gentrification. Another article on temporary forms of UA as a sustainability fix has been published in Environment & Planning E: Nature & Space. Visit www.UrbanAg.info for details or click on the images below to access the publications.
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Mike Simpson and I conducted a survey of urban agriculture initiatives to better understand the practices, motivations, networks, labor and funding sources, and on-the-ground needs or UA organizations and businesses. We released a report of our preliminary results in 2014. Based on this survey, our article in Agriculture and Human Values identifies and describes six diverse but overlapping "motivational frames" - Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Eco-Centric, Educational, DIY Secessionist, and Radical - employed by practitioners engaging in UA.
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Developed together with masters students Jen Turner, Alex Novie, and Monica Cuneo, and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies faculty Sally Eck, this participatory workshop series held in early 2013 provided Portland’s social justice and food systems activists the opportunity to collaborate, learn, network, and co-produce anti-oppression strategies with the goal of fostering the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-class alliances necessary to transform the food movement into an integrated effort that emphasizes both food systems and social justice. It was funded by a grant from PSU’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions. You can read about the project in a chapter in an edited volume entitled Sustainable Solutions: Let Knowledge Serve the City.
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My Senior Capstone class and I worked in collaboration with Portland’s Urban Farm Collective to analyze the impact of the organization’s work and to make recommendations for how to better engage a more diverse community in light of gentrification in Inner NE Portland. In 2014, we developed a food justice framework and outreach plan for the Collective.
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I worked with the French non-governmental organization Zanmi Lasante Paris, which operates in coordination with Partners in Health, to conduct a farmer needs assessment in the Plateau Central. We interviewed 200 farmers in more than a dozen villages, as well as conducted a baseline survey of agroecological characteristics and farming practices. The report (also published in French) was quoted in the opening lines in a National Geographic article on soil in Haiti. More importantly, the research laid the groundwork for a "training of trainers" workshop in June 2005 for extensionists working with two peasant organizations, ASEDECC and SOPABO. I developed the training materials (in Kreyòl) with fellow NCSU alum Arthur "Gill" Green (Okanagan College). Li rezime rapò a an Kreyol.
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