2022 Graduate Geography Award Recipients

Robert Nutifafa Arku

Robert holds both MA Planning (University of Waterloo) and BSc. Land Economy (KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana) degrees. His research interests span both the global north and south.

In the global north, Robert’s work focuses on the equitable impacts of public infrastructure provision on Canadian communities. This includes tracing the impacts of new public transit infrastructure on land values to eventual neighborhood demographic composition, and more recently, examining ways to fund costly upfront capital costs and related infrastructure essential for transit and transit-oriented communities.

In the global south, Robert is interested in urban growth and management in Africa. He recently conducted a sentiment analysis of 'tweets' related to smart cities to understand public perceptions of smart cities in Africa.

Amanda Norton

Amanda's research examines the relationship between spatial health exposures (i.e., air pollution) and social deprivation. Amanda is interested in the identification of environmental injustices through data-driven methods. Through social determinants of health and other public health frameworks, health exposures related to community marginalization may be identified.

Chung-Yen Cheng

Chung-Yen is a cultural and environmental geographer. He is a first-year master’s student in human geography, supervised by Prof. Alana Boland. Chung-Yen is currently studying how weather disrupts work schedule in an atmospheric science experiment that took place Taiwan. He hopes his research could help improve working conditions in a way that attends to challenges brought by increasingly unpredictable weather. Before he graduated with a Bachelor of Science with Honors in Geography from National Taiwan University, Chung-Yen had conducted research on the environmental and social impacts of farmland factories, relationship between humans and stray cats in a ‘Cat Village,’ and China’s ambition to expand territory in the air and below ground.

Caroline Lou

Caroline Lou (she/her) is a Masters of Human Geography student who is assessing case-based research ethics training for environmental scientists on approaches to conducting ethical research with Indigenous communities. Prior to starting her Masters degree, Caroline worked in various policy and research roles in the Ontario Public Service including with the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks; The Ontario Cabinet Office; and the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a minor in Environment from McGill University.

Anahid Z. Simitian

Anahid Z. Simitian is a PhD student in Human Geography with a background in architecture and design. Her research explores food insecurity in the Middle East. She is particularly interested in socio-spatial organizations of rural agrarian communities, investigating how gender and religion shape processes of food production, access to land, and relationship to nature. Her work is situated at the intersections of feminist political ecology and feminist political geography, sub-disciplines that allow for a multi-scalar analysis of a region entangled in geopolitical conflicts.

Jane Yearwood

Jane is a first year MA student researching actually-existing commons in Toronto, and the formation of more-than-capitalist subjectivity and relational ways of being in these spaces. She is currently focusing on urban gardens as commons, and has begun thesis work exploring these spaces.

Scarlett Rakowska

Scarlett Rakowska is interested in urban health and greenness. She completed her undergraduate and masters degrees at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) focusing on geographic information systems and remote sensing. Her undergraduate thesis investigated the effects of greenness on academic achievement at Ontario elementary schools. Her masters thesis mapped microscale heat exposure through land use regression and regression kriging in Mississauga. Scarlett will continue her research as a PhD student at UTM, under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Adams.

Meghan Gagliardi

Meghan's intellectual and creative work studies the white-settler psyche, possession, non-linear time, and urban violence through poetry and writing in human geography. Her doctoral research examines multi-scalar enactments of white-settler racial and colonial violence in Nogojiwanong—a place colonized and renamed Peterborough by white-settlers occupying Anishinaabeg territory. This project explores how white-settler activity in this region generates an enduring atmosphere of racial and settler-colonial violence over time. This atmospheric study examines how this multi-scalar activity projects, materializes, and fortifies the settler-colonial imaginary by restricting and constraining racialized communities’ right to access the city and to produce urban space.

Simran Persaud

Simran Persaud, a Master’s student supervised by Dr. Matthew Adams, is using her Master’s thesis to investigate if the common dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, can function as a bio-monitor of trace metal deposition.This thesis has two key impacts. First, most work on the impact of roadways on ecosystems focuses on exhaust emissions, and this thesis will highlight the importance of accounting for non-exhaust emissions, particularly when policymakers propose constructing new roadways. Second, if Taraxacum officinale proves to be an effective bio-monitor for trace metals, it paves the way to cost-effectively monitor non-exhaust emissions across most transportation systems in Southern Ontario, due to the abundance of this species.

Jonah Durrant Olsen

Jonah Olsen is a PhD Candidate in Human Geography at the University of Toronto and a Visiting Researcher at Mondragon Unibertsitatea. His dissertation research examines the conditions of possibility for economic alterity through ethnographic fieldwork in the Spanish Basque Country and the Italian region of Emilia Romagna. His research is particularly focused on the historical and contemporary socio-spatial dynamics that continue to sustain the cooperative movements in each region. Jonah has also conducted research on food security and the social economy in South and Southeast Asia as part of the international DriedFishMatters research project, as well as on the politics of the state, music, and revolution in Chile and Cuba.

Kaela Sanborn-Hum

Kaela is a second year Geography Masters student. Her research interests include digital property technologies and the role of private real estate actors shaping the political and financial priorities of municipalities. Kaela's primary research focuses on start-up digital platforms facilitating remote investment in single-family rental housing markets in the US and the attending policy challenges. Previously, she was a labor organizer in Oakland, California.

Maleeha Shams

Maleeha is a MA Human Geography student with an undergraduate background in international development and health policy. Her research interests lie in heath geography, specifically issues of health equity and exploring health outcomes and disparities of different racial/ethnocultural groups in the context of the Greater Toronto Area. Her Master's Major Research Paper focused on the health-related lived experiences of racialized individuals and how they shaped individuals’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto. Maleeha conducted a qualitative research study with residents in Thorncliffe Park as a site of interest. She has a passion for community-based research and working on community development projects. Her previous research experience in Human Geography with Prof. Thembela Kepe has focused on people-environment interactions, land rights, politics of development, and colonial violence and dispossession.

Andrew Michél

In human geography, I am particularly interested in the interconnected relationships between kinship, nation, race-ethnicity, sexuality, territory, place-identity, and nation-state. My research looks at the kinship practices of queer men of African ancestry linked to place-based identity in Berlin and how they place-make and make home by queering the kinship of place-based identities, often within hostile cultural, political, cultural landscapes, and exclusionary geographies. I use Black studies and queer colour critiques, draw them to Black and Queer geographies, emotional and psychological geographies, as well as political and cultural landscapes, and interweave race, sexuality, class, language, abilities, and region, to gain further insight into how these influence the kinship of place-specific identity and embodiment and how they inform subject formation, endorsed by the nation/state and it materiality on embodied "diffe

Hamza Chatila

Hamza focused his research on housing issues in Ontario. Inspired by his experience working at the Region of Peel’s Housing Development Office, Hamza wrote his Current Issues Paper to tackle the assess why the City of Toronto’s Housing Now initiative failed to develop any units since its inception.

Marcellinus Essah

Broadly, Marcellinus’ research interests include the Political economy/ecology of the environment; agrarian change and sustainable food systems; rural livelihoods and development; and critical development studies. Marcellinus’ PhD dissertation explores Ghana’s digital agriculture policy, smallholding farming, and food security. Specifically, Marcellinus seeks to understand whether the digital agriculture policy is contributing to the viability of or undermining independent smallholding household farms, and to better understand how digital agriculture increases or compromises food security at the household scale as well as in the country more generally. Marcellinus’ work makes a critical intervention by asking whose interest matter in food and agriculture policy making in Ghana.

Elysia Fuller-Thomson

Elysia seeks to understand how pollutants and contaminants move through urban environments as well as which population groups they most affect. She studies the local variation of both transport-related and industry-related air pollutants in Hamilton, ON. In collaboration with the City of Hamilton and Environment Hamilton, she works to use field sampling, laboratory analysis, and spatial modelling in order to gather ward-level and subpopulation-specific observations to better understand which regions and socioeconomic categories are most impacted by local air pollution exposure.

Garrett T. Morgan

Garrett T Morgan MSc, MScPl, AICP, LEED GA, WELL AP is PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto co-supervised by Dr. Blake Poland & Dr. John Robinson. His dissertation research explores issues of procedural, recognitional, and distributive justice in the equity-informed, municipal climate action efforts of Toronto, Glasgow, New Orleans, and Amsterdam. Mr. Morgan is also a licensed urban planner and policy consultant with professional experience in the public, private, and non-profit sectors in rural, suburban, and urban environments in Canada and the United States.

Sarah Chocano Barboza

Sarah is a first-year Human Geography PhD student whose research lies at the intersection of intercultural education, urban Mapuche activism, and affective ecologies. She does ethnographic fieldwork within urban intercultural day-care centres in Santiago de Chile. This work seeks to understand how Mapuche caregivers sustain cultural revitalization efforts by strengthening Mapuche children's affective links with their peers and the land. These efforts seek to teach younger generation to respect Indigenous cultures and protect natural landscapes, illuminating caregivers’ hope for a different future where Indigenous lives and the land are respected.