Location: Woodside Hall, Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre.All ages are welcome to attend.Date and Time: Monday, November 18 7:00-9:00pm. Please register below for this event.
Panelists will discuss how cities are focal points for climate justice—as spaces where we can agitate against inequalities exacerbated by poor urban planning and policy—while acknowledging how cities swallow up resources, land and people, creating new ecologies and relationships with the environment. How can urban nature impact our health and wellbeing and how can communities create their own experiences with urban nature outside of expectations of politicians or neoliberal policy? What do we need to address urban heat, tornadoes and floods? And how can we build community in urban spaces when our air, water, and land is increasingly under threat?
All this and more will be discussed among panelists and with our audience. What are your concerns about a healthy city in the climate crisis? Please share your ideas with us. We look forward to a robust discussion and community building opportunity.
Professor Barbara Leckie is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. She is the author of Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time (Stanford UP, 2022) and Open Houses: Poverty, the Architectural Idea, and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Britain(U of Penn P, 2018) as well as several articles and edited collections. She is currently co-creating a SSHRC-funded podcast, Commons Sense, on the commons, climate change, and public conversation and working on a book project tentatively entitled “Co-Writing the Climate Crisis.” She is also Academic Director of Re.Climate: Centre for Climate Communication and Public Engagement, Canada’s national centre for climate communication.
Professor John M. Zelenski is a Professor of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada where he has lived and worked for more than 20 years. He completed psychology degrees at Northwestern University (B.A.), the University of Michigan (M.A.), and Washington University in St. Louis (Ph.D.). As a researcher and director of the Carleton University Happiness Laboratory (CUHL), he studies individual differences in happiness, and how personality manifests itself 'in the moment' as emotional and cognitive processes. His research has long focused on the causes and consequences of extraverted behaviour. Recently, more research has focused on the well-being benefits of interacting with nature, how people form subjective connections with nature, and how these are associated with pro-social and sustainable behaviours. More personally, he increasingly derives happiness from birding, kayaking, camping, fishing, or merely strolling in nature. As an educator, Dr. Zelenski has taught courses on personality, research methods, and positive psychology at Carleton and 'around the world' as part of the Semester at Sea program, consistently earning positive student evaluations. Dr. Zelenski has also written a textbook, Positive Psychology: The Science of Well-Being (Sage Publishing).
Dr. Emma Bider is a resource and training coordinator at Re.Climate. She completed her doctoral work in anthropology at Carleton. Her research interests include human/environment relationships, environmental activism, and how different groups imagine the future in the context of climate change. Her dissertation specifically examined people's relationships to the urban trees of Ottawa. In addition to research and work, Emma is a member of Climate Justice Ottawa and is interested in how art is used in activism to foster community and enact change. She is also a creative writer. Her collection of speculative short stories We Animals explores people's relationships to animals and their animals selves. It was published in 2020.
Professor Sheryl-Ann Simpson My research and teaching are informed by an interest in the ways in which states and communities interact in place. How are government policies and programs implemented or translated into everyday experiences; how do community members use, narrate and shape their environments; and in turn how do those actions and stories influence new government policies and programs. I focus this general interest through questions around citizenship and immigration, and environmental justice and urban health. These interests also reflect my interdisciplinary training centered around social planning and community development with stops in political science, biology and geography.
Lecturer Meera Karunananthan Conflicts over the control of freshwater supplies have become a defining feature of capitalism in the 21st century. As an engaged researcher, I am committed to theorizing these “hydro-social” conflicts by bringing critical geography and feminist theory into conversation with knowledge produced by grassroots movements at the frontlines. My academic work is shaped by many years of experience in environmental and social justice organizing. Building on relationships with feminist, indigenous and environmental justice movements, my current research investigates the processes that produce uneven distribution of water in cities of the global South. As a feminist political ecologist, I am concerned with the ways in which market-based solutions to climate change and drought reproduce power asymmetries and legitimize the ongoing dispossession of historically marginalized groups. Specifically, I examine the racialized, class-based and gendered impacts of privatization, and financialization of urban water systems.
