Peter A Allard School of Law

NO FLY ZONE SPEAKER: Re-Thinking Waste: Mapping Racial Geographies of Violence on the Colonial Landscape

Centre for the Law and the Environment Assistant

Centre for the Law and the Environment Assistant

Jan 22, 2021

DATE: Tuesday, February 9 (12:30 pm - 2:00 pm PST) 

Join us for a public talk by Dr. Ingrid Waldron on environmental racism and injustice in Canada.

Dr. Waldron will examine the social justice dimensions of race, place, and space in the Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, and unpack how hierarchies and intersections of race, culture, gender, income, class, and other social identities are spatialized in the places and spaces where we live, work, and play. 

Dr. Walrdon will also highlight the larger socio-spatial processes that create disproportionate exposure and vulnerability to the harmful social, economic, and health impacts of inequality in Indigenous and Black communities, while maintaining a critical focus on race as an important analytical entry point for understanding spatial violence in urban and rural spaces where racialized people are harmed by unemployment, income insecurity, poverty, food insecurity, gentrification, police brutality, and proximity to polluting industries. Dr. Waldron's talk will challenge the traditional notions of “the environment” that are centered on harmonizing cities and nature.

Commentary will be made by Professor Dayna Scott, York Research Chair in Environmental Law & Justice in the Green Economy, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.

WATCH THE RECORDING

 

About the Speaker

Ingrid Walrdon Headshot

Dr. Ingrid Waldron is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health at Dalhousie University, the Team Co-Lead of the Improving the Health of People of African Descent Flagship at the Healthy Populations Institute at Dalhousie, and the Executive Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities & Community Health Project (The ENRICH Project).

The ENRICH Project was launched in 2012 to investigate and document the socio-economic, political, and health effects of environmental racism in African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia, Canada.  

The ENRICH Project formed the basis to Dr. Waldron’s first book There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, which received the 2020 Society for Socialist Studies Errol Sharpe Book Prize and the 2019 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing.

The 2020 Netflix documentary There’s Something in the Water is based on Dr. Waldron’s book and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page, Ian Daniel, and Julia Sanderson.

The ENRICH Project also formed the basis to the creation of the provincial private members bill An Act to Address Environmental Racism (Bill 111), which was introduced in the Nova Scotia Legislature on April 29, 2015 and moved to second reading on November 25, 2015. She also helped develop the federal private members bill a National Strategy to Redress Environmental Racism (Bill C-230), which was introduced in the House of Commons on February 26, 2020 and moved to second reading on December 8, 2020.

Dr. Waldron recently co-founded the National Anti-Environmental Racism Coalition with Naolo Charles, the Executive Director of the Black Environmental Initiative. The Coalition has brought together organizations in the environmental and climate change sector to collaborate on projects and share expertise and resources to address environmental racism in Black and Indigenous communities across Canada.

Dr. Waldron is also leading other studies and projects on climate change in African Nova Scotian communities, the impact of COVID-19 in the African Nova Scotian community in the Prestons, and mental illness and help-seeking in Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities.

 

Ingrid Waldron Large Poster of Event

  • Centre for Law and the Environment
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