Recently Funded Research Projects in Geography

Department of Geography




Recently Funded Research Projects in Geography

 

Dr. Marilyne Jollineau
 
Project Title:  Integration of Remotely Sensed Data into a Precision Agriculture System for Improved Vineyard Management
 
Funding Agency:  Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE)
 
Project Description:  Dr. Marilyne Jollineau recently received OCE funding for her research project on the integration of remotely sensed data into a precision agriculture system for improved vineyard management in the Niagara Region.  This project involves the development of image-derived information products using high-resolution airborne and spaceborne remote-sensing data, correlated with ground-based data, to assess vine condition.  The development of such products is ideally suited for integration within a precision agriculture system (PAS); such a system is currently being developed by Niagara College.  For more information about this project, please contact Dr. Jollineau by email at mjollineau@brocku.ca.
 
Dr. Phillip Mackintosh
 
Project Title:  ‘Toronto the Good’: bourgeois geographies in an English Canadian city before 1920 (2007-2010)
 
Funding Agency: Tri-Council Funding Social Sciences (SSHRCC SRG)
 
Project Description:  Dr. Phillip Gordon Mackintosh recently received SSHRC funding for his research project investigating the bourgeois imagining of public space in late Victorian and Edwardian Toronto.  Identifying class, gender, race and environmental determinism as central components of urban reform, he hopes to demonstrate the why and how of bourgeois geographies: parks and playgrounds, streets, roads, boulevards and sidewalks. For more information about this project, please contact Professor Mackintosh by email at pmackintosh@brocku.ca.
 
Dr. Catherine Nash
 
Project Title:  Leaving the gaybourhood: Queer politics in Toronto” (2008-2011)
 
Funding Agency:  Tri-Council Funding Social Sciences (SSHRCC SRG)
 
Project Description:  Dr. Nash recently received SSHRC funding for her research project on a the newly emerging ‘queer’ neighbourhood located on Queen Street West, west of Dufferin St.  in downtown Toronto. The research considers the social, political and economic implications of the formation of a self-stylized ‘queer’ district that positions itself as an alternative community location for those looking beyond Toronto’s so-called traditional LGBT village at Church and Wellesley Streets. The research explores not only the spatial formation and organization of ‘queer’ identities, practices and ways of being but positions these within the larger questions of urban planning and politics; urban cosmopolitanism; sexual citizenship and tourism; and identity politics and difference.  More information about this project, or expressions of interest in research assistantships, please contact:  Dr. Nash by email at cnash@brocku.ca.

 

Dr. David Butz

Project Title: "Life in the Fast Lane: Road Construction, Accessibility and Social Change in Shimshal, Pakistan" (2009-2012; Co-investigator with Dr. Nancy Cook, Sociology)

Funding Agency:  Tri-Council Funding Social Sciences (SSHRCC SRG)

Project Description:  Dr. Butz and Dr. Cook (Sociology) recently received funding to conduct an analysis of a road building project in Shimshal, a rural community in mountainous northern Pakistan.  The project aims to produce a historically-grounded ethnography of social change in Shimshal in the context of increases in accessibility facilitated by the road’s construction. To the extent that the study will rely heavily on community-members’ own perspectives and experiences, it will also be an autoethnography of social change. The study will provide a detailed analysis of an indigenous community in a rapid phase of transition. As such it will be a valuable contribution to ethnographic scholarship on the Karakoram region of Pakistan, and also to larger bodies of critical scholarship on development and modernization in rural parts of the developing world. For more information about this project, please contact Professor Butz by email at dbutz@brocku.ca.