Contributors
Originally from Ottawa, EMILIE K. ADIN has a master's degree from the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. She credits much of her knowledge on tenant activism and social capital to her opportunity, through the Consortium for Sustainable Community Development and Planning, to study at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before her studies in community planning, her experience lay mainly in the arenas of environmental and feminist activism. At present, she is coordinating a community planning process for a First Nations community in the far north of British Columbia.
DEBORAH BARNDT is a popular educator, photographer and professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University who has worked for more than twenty-five years in social justice movements in the Americas. Most recently, she coordinated a collaborative research project on the continental food system, involving feminist academics and popular educators from Mexico, the United States and Canada (including co-authors Sheelagh Davis and Egla Martinez-Salazar). Her publications include Education and Social Change: A Photographic Study of Peru; A New Weave (with Rick Arnold and Bev Burke); Naming the Moment; To Change This House; Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain (edited); and Tangled Routes: Women on the Tomato Trail.
EMILY CHAN was raised in an inspiring community of Chinese Canadian activists in Toronto, Canada. She has worked with the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance since 1999. Emily received her BSc. from the University of Toronto and her Master of Environmental Studies in Planning from York University. Across geographical borders, she commits her energy to working for environmental justice, fair and just access to healthy food, freedom schooling for young Chinese Canadians and young women of colour, prisoners' rights, and strengthening activism by young people of colour in Canada and the United States.
SHEELAGH DAVIS is a popular educator and social justice/environmental activist who has worked with a diversity of communities in British Columbia, Ontario, South Africa and several countries in Latin America, most recently working on human rights and community sustainability in Mexico. She recently completed an interdisciplinary master's degree in Environmental Studies at York University, in the context of which she worked actively on the question of applying popular education methodology to community organizing for change around justice issues.
GENE DESFOR teaches at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, and he has been actively involved with union and community organizations for years. He served for one year as Canadian Coordinator for the Consortium on Sustainable Community Development and Planning. His research focuses on urban development processes and he has been working on an international comparison of the making of urban environmental policy. Most recently his scholarly work has taken him to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he has been investigating the political economy of recent developments on the waterfront.
SARAH KOCH-SCHULTE is currently a PhD student in Political Science at The New School for Social Research in New York City. She completed her MA in Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver; her thesis was on Resistances of Tele-Service Workers: Implications for Qualitative Policy Research (2000). Her interests are in feminism, labour research, qualitative poverty research and urban planning. She has co-authored two recent World Bank publications: Can Anyone Hear Us? Voices from 47 Countries (2000) and Crumbling Foundations, Conflicting Relations: Gender, Institutions and Poverty: A Review of World Bank Participatory Poverty Assessments (2000). As a consortium participant, Sarah Koch-Schulte attended Cornell University during Winter term 1999.
W. ALEXANDER LONG recently completed a graduate degree in environmental studies at York University in Toronto, focusing on integrated waste management from a social perspective, and engaging and educating communities on sustainable living as a way to reduce waste. His experience in work and research in Latin America is extensive, and the field work for the case study featured in his chapter was undertaken while on exchange at the Centre for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Guadalajara. He is currently working on environmental policy issues in Toronto.
EGLA J. MARTINEZ-SALAZAR, a Guatemalan-born Mestiza (Indigenous, African and Spanish ancestry) from a working-class and peasant background, holds an Honors BA in Women's Studies and a Masters in Environmental Studies, and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Sociology at York University, Toronto. She has experience in popular education, human rights, including those of Indigenous Peoples, and women's rights as well as community development. She and her extended family are also survivors of state repression.
CINDY MCCULLIGH is currently enrolled in the Master's in Environmental Studies program at York University, completing research for a major paper entitled, "Healing Stories, Toxic Revolutions: Mapping Campesino Stories on Agri/culture in Mexico." The chapter in this volume is a critical reflection on field research undertaken from January to September 2000.
BARBARA RAHDER is the Graduate Program Director and Planning Programs Coordinator in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University as well as the Canadian Coordinator of the Consortium on Sustainable Community Development and Planning. For more than twenty years her work has focused on issues of equity and access to housing and community services, using participatory research and community-based planning with marginalized communities in Canada. Her most recent research has examined the relationship between perceptions of health and experiences of urban environments among a diversity of Toronto women, including Native women, immigrant women, teen girls, older women, single mothers and women with a disability.
GALIT WOLFENSOHN is currently working with the Project on Internal Displacement at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, having previously worked with a variety of humanitarian and social justice organizations. Her chapter in this volume is a condensed version of the major research paper she completed in 1999 as part of a master's degree in Refugee and Environmental Studies from York University, Toronto.