Sulemana Saaka recipient of a FOSS Student Research Award, will present the following talk:

Addressing Mining Sector Conflicts in Ghana

During the World Bank and IMF-led Structural Adjustments Program implementation in the 1980s, the extractive industry was also targeted in many developing countries, including Ghana. Although liberalization of the mining industry was envisioned to bring the needed development to the country and mining communities, the evidence on the ground proves otherwise. The outcome has been the prevalence of conflicts between mining communities and mining companies, mainly over issues of environmental pollution, competition over land use, unfulfilled promises, resettlement and compensation.
Using online sources (data) and adopting the ‘developmental state’ approach, which advocates for state-induced development as a conceptual model, this research investigates the role of the Ghanaian government in addressing conflict in the mining sector and the challenges therein. The results show that the state has implemented several initiatives consistent with the developmental state approach including liberalizing small-scale mining and environmental assessment requirements, the passage of the Minerals Development Fund Act, and alternative livelihood programs. However, emanating from competitive clientelism, various challenges have prevented the government’s initiatives from producing the desired outcomes, hence the persistence of conflict in the sector.

supervisor: Hevina S. Dashwood, Professor, Political Science

Tannaz Sattar, recipient of a FOSS Student Research Award, will present the following talk:

Urban Green Space Typology and the Main Indicators for Maximizing their Performance; Case Studies of Isfahan, Milan, and Toronto

Cities play an important role in sustainability and sustainable development. In the context of global development, especially in developing large metropolitans, urban population is growing resulting in social-environmental challenges that jeopardizes sustainability of cities as well as welfare of the citizens. One of these challenges is the quantity and performance of urban green spaces which are essential components in urban areas and the lack of them can affect urban ecology as well as human health and well-being. Developing urban greening concepts in modern urbanization are approaches to overcome the contemporary challenges of cities. Little research has been done on the urban green space typologies and different variables affecting the performance of such spaces. In addition, the literature on comparing this feature in hugely different contexts in various continents is missing. This paper intents to investigate the presence or absence of some urban green space categories in the three case studies, which are city of Isfahan in Iran, city of Milan in Italy, and city of Toronto in Canada, analyze some performance variables in each case, find out the extent to which these categories and performance variables are addressed in each case’s policy documents and official plans, and finally, to compare similarities and differences between the cases.

supervisor: Ryan Plummer, Director, Environmental Sustainability Research Centre

Ege Kamber, recipient of a FOSS Student Research Award, will present the following talk:

The Development of Episodic Thinking in Children: The Contribution of Self-Projection, Scene-Construction, and Episodic Simulation

Research shows that episodic memory, prospection, theory of mind, and navigation are related and share a similar developmental trajectory over childhood. Thus, several domain-general abilities are proposed to underpin these abilities: (a) self-projection, the ability to shift alternatives, is argued to underlie episodic memory, prospection, theory of mind, and navigation; (b) scene construction, the ability to create scenes, supports episodic memory, prospection, and navigation; and (c) episodic simulation is responsible for the functioning of episodic memory and prospection. Despite these theoretical conceptualizations, these domain-general abilities have never been tested simultaneously in children.

The current study examines how and whether each domain-general ability is associated with the skills and which of them is better at explaining children’s performance. The study also aims to track age-related changes in these relations. One hundred fifty 8- to 10-year-old children will participate in the study and complete several behavioural tasks assessing the above-mentioned abilities.

Preliminary analysis (with eight pilot participants) revealed that the tasks capture variability in children’s performance and many of the measures were positively related (rs=.03-.46). Data collection is expected to be completed by Summer 2023. The gathered data will be presented at Research Colloquium.

supervisor: Caitlin Mahy, Associate Professor, Psychology

Naomi Andrews, Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, will present the following talk:

Improving Relationships to Support Substance-Exposed Infants and Young Children

Dr. Andrews will discuss a program of research conducted in partnership with Breaking the Cycle – a community-based early identification and prevention program for mothers with substance use issues and their infants/young children. Through several ongoing research projects, this work centers on understanding infants and young children who have been prenatally exposed to substances. Further, the evaluation of an integrated intervention that focuses on improving the mother-child relationship to enhance child development outcomes will be presented.

Chelsea Jones, Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, will present the following talk:

Critical Access Research: Relaxing Performances and Pedagogies

Beginning with the staging of a pre-pandemic crip fashion show, this presentation will map an evolution of critical access performance-based research that impacts both in-person and online higher education pedagogy. With an emphasis on post-and-with-pandemic disability justice, art, and activism, Dr. Chelsea Jones will discuss what it means to centre disability and access in collaborative research.

Robert Dimand, Professor in the Department of Economics, will present the following talk:

Learning from How Economics Has Changed

My research has looked at how economics has changed, especially about the role of women in the discipline of economics and about how economists have explained
economic fluctuations. My recent books include The Routledge Handbook of the History of Women’s Economic Thought (edited with Kirsten Madden), The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes (edited with Harald Hagemann), and Irving Fisher (in Palgrave Macmillan’s Great Thinkers in Economics series).