My art is about my passion and expression of doodling, allowing the inherent ability of a line, a shape, or a colour to give voice to complex dialogue and relation with the painting. I paint to music, all kinds, that brings an intensity and energy that seems to take on a life of it's own within the work. Visit my website at https://www.jancorcoran.com.
Book review: Angele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman and Bronwen Tucker. The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada. 2023. Toronto. Between the Lines. 219 pages. $29.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781771136129.
Early years are a critical time in the healthy development of young children. It is essential for children to develop healthy bonds with family members to increase well-being. Colonialism has resulted in the loss of many Indigenous activities, intergenerational teachings and relationship-building strategies that encourage wholistic health-promoting behaviours. Research focused on physical activity behaviours among early years children has had limited success. To address these challenges, the Western concept of physical literacy that applies a wholistic approach to physical activity by focusing on physical, social, emotional, and spiritual wellness can align with many Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing. Purpose: Our multi-cultural team embarks on a journey to co-create, and expand a physical literacy enriched and culturally rooted initiative designed to promote wholistic wellness. Methodology: Etuaptmumk (Two-eyed Seeing) guides the team through braiding Indigenous Ways of Knowing,Being and Doing in early childhood wellness and land- and nature-based games alongside Western knowledge of developing physical literacy and promoting risky/ adventurous play. We apply a pre-mid-post design for the meaningful evaluation of the Nature’s Way-Our Way initiative. Impact: Partnering with communities, we aim to produce 40-45 activity cards to promote physical literacy and wholistic health in Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.
My art is about my passion and expression of doodling, allowing the inherent ability of a line, a shape, or a colour to give voice to complex dialogue and relation with the painting. I paint to music, all kinds, that brings an intensity and energy that seems to take on a life of it's own within the work. Visit my website at https://www.jancorcoran.com.
This report from the field presents a community-engaged, visual method for evaluating students’ perceptions of equity in Maker Club, an informal STEM (Science, Technology, Math, and Engineering) education program in Ohio. The purpose of the program is to increase access to and interest in STEM fields among underserved communities. A total of fifteen middle school-aged program participants from two cohorts that were hosted at two different after-school program sites engaged in participant-employed photography to document their views of the implementation of six design principles for equitable learning. The evaluation process unfolded in five phases: 1) recruitment of co-researchers, including explanation of guidelines; 2) teaching co-researchers how to use the camera, including testing out the camera; 3) co-researchers observing, and taking pictures of, students and staff engaged in the makerspace; 4) informal photo interviewing; 5) sharing with program staff via informal conversations and a formal meeting discussion. Takeaways include that co-researchers perceived students benefiting from social support, community partner presence, and local knowledge being recognized. Lessons learned entail keeping students on track, ensuring that there is enough staff support focused on the evaluation process, and being open to other potential, meaningful uses of co-researchers’ photos.
Les apprenant·e·s de français langue seconde (désormais FLS) sont souvent confronté·e·s aux idéologies associées au français dont l’une consiste en une vue homogène de la langue et de la culture francophone. Toutefois, la reconnaissance d’identités plurielles et multiples peut amener un changement au niveau des discours si nous acceptons les multiples variétés de français de personnes plurilingues, non seulement issues de familles immigrantes mais aussi de programmes d’immersion française. Dans cet article, à la lumière de la sociolinguistique pour le changement, nous examinons comment ces idéologies linguistiques influencent certains discours et pratiques d’étudiant·e·s en formation des maîtres ainsi que ceux de jeunes de la communauté d’expression française vivant en Alberta. Après avoir soumis nos données à une analyse de discours, nous constatons que la plupart des apprenant·e·s de FLS ne se perçoivent pas comme faisant partie intégrante de la francophonie. Toutefois, les discours sont en proie au changement et les personnes plurilingues semblent en mesure d’apporter leurs contributions à ces récits et à la façon dont on les déconstruit afin de (re)définir la francophonie canadienne : l’objectif visé étant de miser, à plus long terme, sur une inclusion accrue de tous les locuteurs et locutrices de français au sein de la francophonie mondiale.
As post-secondary institutions continue the slow move towards indigenization and reconciliation, more Indigenous-centred spaces are created. But how many of those spaces are Nation-specific? In this article, we describe one example of a Nation-specific gathering, the Métis Research Symposium, and the impact that the gathering had on the mostly-Métis audience, including the enhanced sense of belonging and connection that the respondents reported. We advocate for institutions and administrators to shift towards creating more Nation-specific opportunities for students, faculty, and staff at all levels.
Youth homelessness in Canada impacts a significant number of young people. More specific to our focus, populations of young people who are more likely to experience homelessness (e.g. youth with mental health issues, 2SLGBTQIA+ youth, youth from care, and Indigenous youth) face significant barriers to accessing safe, culturally appropriate, and supportive education, suggesting rights to housing and rights to education are intersecting equity issues. This article presents findings from a participatory research project led by members of Youth Action Research Revolution, carried out in Tio’tiá:ke/Montréal, Québec, Canada. Building from experiences young people shared, this article highlights aspects of the public education system that pose problems for youth who are precariously housed or homeless, namely, the application of one-size-fits-all approaches, barriers for students with mental health or learning disability diagnoses, and the lack of clear or actionable institutional mechanisms for students to access preventative support. Following this, we outline educational discourses, practices, and processes that constitute where something may have been done differently to prevent homelessness. We conclude with possible actions to support youth homelessness prevention in schools, including creating more flexible ways for children and families to access supports, resourcing “champion” teachers, and addressing the insidious biases and discrimination in the organization of school policies.
Laura Wood is an Ottawa-based artist who paints with gestural strokes to create elegant abstract compositions. Her paintings are evocative and emotive as she uses paint and colour to represent, as Wood describes, “what otherwise cannot be expressed with words.” Her process is intuitive as she is guided by the paint & chance happenings with colour mixing and form. Intentionality happens as she pauses between strokes. This dance back and forth between pure expression and thoughtful mark-making is how her works are created. Originally from Aurora, Ontario, Woods even at a young age had a rich interior life and art gave her a place to fully express all aspects of her internal experience. Her family’s encouragement led her to pursue her passions and she went on to study and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Canada. She is currently represented in Ottawa, ON at Koyman Galleries.
Housing injustice is a serious public health issue among young women and femmes (aged 18-24) in Canada but the research available on this topic seldom centres the voices of people with lived and living experience. This population is marginally visible in the shelter systems; instead their experiences may be described as “hidden homelessness”. This housing typology refers to situations where someone seeks shelter in ways like couch-surfing, car sleeping, or other short-term accommodations that are not typically recognized as responding to housing injustice. Drawing from a methodology of social constructionism, this paper reviews findings from an arts-based inquiry that sought to answer the research question, “what are the survival and resistance strategies that young women and femmes experiencing housing injustice use to support their wellness and engage with life?” Using reflexive thematic analysis, a zine was created and analyzed to reveal five themes: 1). Affective and Psychological Strategies of Resistance; 2). Survival Strategies and Behaviours to Ensure Material Survival; 3). Felt Knowledge About Good Living; 4). Organized Abandonment and Other Normed Chaos; and, 5). Importance of Human Connection, Solidarity, and Radical Care. The strengths and limitations, along with implications for public health policy and research are discussed.
Canada’s 2019 Housing Strategy Act (NHSA) lays the groundwork for important advances in ensuring the right to housing for all. Two key approaches outlined in the NHSA for communities in greatest need are conducting research and providing participatory ways for those communities to shape housing rights responses. This article presents insights from a project that explored how people with lived experience of housing need and homelessness engage in research on housing precarity in Canada. We review the literature on housing precarity that features people with lived experience as research participants, applying an intersectional framework and acknowledging the settler colonial context of Canada. And, as a research team who has members with lived experiences of housing precarity, we emphasize the importance of meaningfully incorporating people’s lived experiences, seeing deep engagement as a way to advance housing rights by harnessing lived knowledges.
This article explores how community-engaged, art-based research methods can enrich our understanding of homelessness, with a specific focus on housing insecurity in rural urban communities. Drawing on a digital storytelling project in Dufferin County, Ontario, involving twelve storytellers- ten with lived experience of homelessness - we explore the complexities of homelessness that are often neglected in official narratives of housing and home. We argue that the dominant methods of documenting homelessness - enumeration through point-in-time (PiT) counts - provide a limited understanding of homelessness and can contribute to the invisibility of these problems in rural-urban spaces. We explore how a participant-led critical engagement can help make visible experiences of housing insecurity as a form of homelessness, and direct focus to the intersection of individual circumstances with structural factors, pointing to key areas for policy change.
In this special issue on Engaged Scholarship and Housing Security, we share the insights of emergent approaches, digital tools, advocate-scholars, and community champions doing the hard work. We recognize, support, and highlight research and researchers of all types who are using engaged scholarship, community-based approaches, and/or community-driven and managed research and activities around housing security, including those using diverse and multiple ways of knowing about housing security.
In this issue, Wanda Martin, Kerry McPhedran, Shelley Kirychuk, and Lori Bradford, ESJ’s editor-in-chief, explores the concept of engaged scholarship within the realm of housing insecurity and the built environment. They shared their insights and experiences regarding the challenges and opportunities inherent in engaged scholarship, particularly in addressing inequities in housing and the built environment.
Social networks, and the supports they provide, are often thought to be key to the survival of those living in poverty. Rooted in a partnered research initiative on the housing experiences of tenants in greatest need, we examine the social support networks of low-income renters living in market housing, while in receipt of rent subsidies and assistance from housing workers to do so. Based on 21 interviews with tenants and service providers, we find that participants in our study have very limited informal social support, which is also confined to instrumental rather than emotional dimensions. Many deliberately did not engage with those with whom they once socialized or their neighbours, and identified spatial aspects of their housing that facilitated removal from harmful networks. However, it is also clear that individuals in our study were not without ties. Despite having limited, and also actively limiting, informal ties, participants sought out and received extensive material and emotional support from non-profit organizations including harm reduction, youth and women’s centres, as well as from housing workers. Results amplify the role of these organizations beyond material survival; implications include ensuring tenants are able to access the organizations on which they rely, and adequately resourcing non-profits.
This book is a short yet powerful contribution to the literature on housing in Canada. It will be of great interest to anyone seeking a highly readable and forceful critique of Canada’s inequitable housing markets as well as a prescription for an alternate approach.Tranjan is an analyst for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, an organization that seeks to bring progressive research and analysis into Canadian policy debates.
The book has ten chapters, and to gradually ease readers into the issues to be discussed, Crosby, in chapter one, adopts a story-telling approach. He starts off by narrating his housing experiences during his teenage years, describing what affordable living was like and how that compares to the Heron Gate and Heatherington neighbourhoods as it relates to the general “make-up of the neighbourhood” and the “sense of community” it offered.
We discuss early reflections of a housing security research project focused on implementing intersectional praxis across the life cycle of community-based participatory research. Drawing on our team’s initial Co-learning Workshop, including community and academic partners, we share initial learnings of our collective engagement with the connections between intersectionality and housing security. Specifically, we reflect on three key challenges, or “hopeful hesitations,” that have emerged as we begin our collaboration: co-defining intersectionality (including both theory and implementation); integrating intersectionality into the multi-scaled complexities of housing security; and communicating the relevance of intersectionality to a wider network of actors in housing security policy and programming. We suggest that an intersectional lens is crucial to housing security work because of the ways it attends to the everyday lived experiences of housing insecurity, the interlocking forms of oppression that create differentiated experiences, and the specific contexts in which structural housing inequities take root.
The search for and replication of scalable models for affordable housing amid North America’s housing insecurity crisis has been frustratingly slow. Governments are flailing—and, so far, failing—as they try to put in place the necessary policies and incentives for the private, public, and non-profit sectors to accelerate the construction of the millions of new affordable units required to confront the crisis. This paper highlights one model whose replication is underway in Winnipeg’s downtown core: that of a mixed-income, mixed-use residential tower offering nearly half of its units at affordable rental prices for marginalized residents and designed, built, and managed with a deep commitment to multi-dimensional sustainability. The catalyst for this initiative is the University of Winnipeg Community Renewal Corporation (UWCRC), a non-profit foundation that works in partnership with community organizations and is now Winnipeg’s leading social real estate developer. The Corporation is the second component of the model. While there are no perfect strategies for solving the housing crisis, UWCRC’s approach deserves to be widely known, deeply studied, and rapidly adapted and replicated at scale by universities, colleges, and other public institutions in urban centres throughout North America. Engaged scholars can play important roles in this effort.
