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Researchers-in-Residence 2020 - 2021

Tammara Soma

TERM: JANUARY - AUGUST, 2021

Tammara Soma originally hails from West Java, Indonesia. She holds a PhD in Planning (2018) from the University of Toronto and is the Research Director and Co-Founder of the Food Systems Lab. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University where she conducts research on issues pertaining to food system planning, community-based food research, youth and food literacy, social innovation and waste management and the circular economy. Prior to SFU, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, and the Food Equity Coordinator at New College (University of Toronto). Soma is actively involved in food justice work. She was one of the founding members of the Toronto Youth Food Policy Council, and has worked with FoodShare Toronto, and Sustain Ontario.

Soma’s research projects are funded by the SSHRC New Frontiers, SSHRC Trans-Atlantic Platform, SSHRC Insight, SSHRC Partnership Engagement Grant, and Weston Foundation Seeding Food Innovation Grant. She co-led a tri-country team (U.S, Mexico and Canada) on a Commission for Environmental Cooperation project to develop the Food Matters: Action Kit for youth engagement in food loss and food waste reduction. She is also co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Food Waste. Soma was selected and served as a committee member of the US National Academies of Science “A Systems Approach to Reducing Consumer Food Waste” and contributed to the publication of the consensus study A National Strategy to Reduce Food Waste at the Consumer Level. She is a board member of the Canadian Association of Food Studies.

Daniel Rajasooriar, Graduate Student

Daniel Rajasooriar is a second-year master’s student in the Resource and Environmental Planning Program. As a Graduate Research Fellow with the Community-Engaged Research Initiative and a Graduate Research Assistant with the Food Systems Lab, Daniel is working in collaboration with the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition on the “Getting Around to Feed Ourselves Well” project. The project explores the intersection of access to transit and food security for users of nonprofit food hubs in the City of Vancouver before and during the COVID-19 crisis. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in Geography from Simon Fraser University.Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award, and the Ratner Award for Distinguished Teaching (2019). She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and was the Vice-President of the Japanese Art History Forum for three years. Her next project, Art, Gender, and Transpacific Erasures, considers the Pacific War and its traumatic afterlives through the lens of contemporary artists in Japan and North America.

Samantha Jung, Graduate Student

Samantha Jung is a second year master’s student in the School of Resource and Environmental Management (Planning). For her research, she is working in partnership with the Kitselas First Nation to create a food asset map that employs the use of Photovoice, a socially innovative and novel qualitative framework that centres the perspectives of community members to advance systemic and sustainable solutions for tackling local food insecurity through photography and storytelling. She is currently a research assistant with the Food Systems Lab and is a planning intern with the First Nations Health Authority.

Justine Chambers

ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
TERM: JANUARY - AUGUST, 2021

Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances that are already there – the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her recent choreographic projects include: And then this also, One hundred more, tailfeather, for all of us, it could have been like this, ten thousand times and one hundred more,  Family Dinner, Family Dinner: The Lexicon, Semi-precious: the faceting of a gemstone only appears complete and critical; Enters and Exits and COPY. Chambers' work has been hosted by Sophiensaele (Berlin), Contemporary Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Agora de la Danse (Montreal), Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery (Pennsylvania), Canada Dance Festival (Ottawa), Nanaimo Art Gallery, Artspeak, Burrard Arts Foundation, Mile Zero Dance Society, Dance in Vancouver, Festival of New Dance (St. John's) and Art Museum at University of Toronto. Chambers is the recipient of the Lola Dance Prize (2018), and was selected for the Visiting Dance Artist Program at the National Arts Centre (2018-2019). She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Namiko Kunimoto

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCHER-IN-RESIDENCE
TERM: JANUARY - APRIL, 2021

Namiko Kunimoto’s work focuses on race, gender, and urbanization through art and visual culture. She has written on family photography during the Japanese-Canadian incarceration in “Intimate Archives: Japanese-Canadian Family Photography, 1939-1945,” on displacement and labour in “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games,” and on the depiction of blackness in Japanese art in The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art. As Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University, she has organized community discussions on bystander training, panels on the incarceration of Japanese-American, Latino/a people, and First Nations peoples at Fort Sil, and workshops on how to take action against racism during COVID19.

Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award, and the Ratner Award for Distinguished Teaching (2019). She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and was the Vice-President of the Japanese Art History Forum for three years. Her next project, Art, Gender, and Transpacific Erasures, considers the Pacific War and its traumatic afterlives through the lens of contemporary artists in Japan and North America.

Lyana Patrick

TERM: SEPTEMBER, 2020 - APRIL, 2021

Lyana Patrick is an Indigenous scholar and practitioner from the Stellat’en First Nation and Acadian/Scottish. She has worked as an education specialist for over two decades, developing curriculum, managing education programs and evaluating Indigenous health and education initiatives. She has also worked as a community planner, most recently for the City of Vancouver helping design community engagement for a municipal poverty reduction strategy. Dr. Patrick works together with communities to develop Indigenous-focused, collaborative research models that can transform Indigenous experiences of health, planning and justice. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University where her work focuses on the intersection of community planning, health and justice.

Enda Brophy

TERM: MAY 2020 - APRIL, 2021

Enda Brophy is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and an Associate in Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce, which won book of the year awards from the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies and the Canadian Communication Association in 2018. With Greig de Peuter, Nicole Cohen, Kate Oakley and Marisol Sandoval he collaborates on Cultural Workers Organize, a research project exploring collective responses to precarious employment by workers in cultural and creative industries. He has translated numerous works by Italian scholars, including Gigi Roggero’s The Production of Living Knowledge: Crisis of the University and Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America and Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa’s The Work of Love: Unpaid Housework, Poverty and Sexual Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century.

Lillian Deeb, Research Assistant

Lillian Deeb is a researcher, labour advocate, and organizer who received her MA in the School of Communication at SFU. Her MA research focused on debates around the new geological age 'the Anthropocene,' seeking to understand the historical causes of anthropogenic climate change. Her research interests include direct democracy, labour rights, social movements, the social implications of science and technology, and political ecology. Most recently she served as the Chief Steward for the Teaching Support Staff Union, where she was responsible for enforcing the collective agreement, ensuring members were aware of their rights, empowering them to become actively involved in the advocacy branch of the union, and supporting the organizing drive to unionize research assistants and grant employees at SFU.

Yi Chien Jade Ho 何宜謙, Graduate Student

Yi Chien Jade Ho 何宜謙 is a PhD candidate and a member of Academic Council at the Center for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education at the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Jade was a community-based researcher at the Maple Ridge Environmental School Project, a buildingless public elementary school in Maple Ridge, BC. Jade has been a housing-rights organizer working intergenerationally in Vancouver’s Chinatown to fight against gentrification and racism. She is also a labour organizer with the Teaching Support Staff Union. In 2019, she was part of a successful unionization drive for research assistants and grant employees at SFU, making RAs at SFU the first unionized research workers in West Coast Canada. Her doctoral work centers on developing a radical pedagogy of place through decolonial lenses focusing on settlers of color and their connection to place, land and identity.

Angela Kaida

TERM: SEPTEMBER - DECEMBER, 2020

Angela Kaida is an Associate Professor and global health epidemiologist in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Global Perspectives on HIV and Sexual and Reproductive Health. Dr. Kaida has been awarded funding from CIHR, SSHRC, Grand Challenges Canada, and the National Institutes of Health to lead a global research program focused on factors and environments that increase vulnerability or protect sexual and reproductive health, in the context of HIV. Dr. Kaida works closely with community leaders and decision-makers to integrate research evidence into health policy and programming, attending to social and gender equity. She has served in numerous institutional, national, and global leadership roles including with the WHO Department of Reproductive Health and Research, sub-Saharan African Network of TB and HIV research Excellence (SANTHE), the Canadian Association for HIV Research (CAHR), and the BC Women’s Health Research Institute (WHRI). To read more about Dr. Kaida’s research contributions, please click here.

Nicholas Blomley

TERM: MAY - DECEMBER, 2020

Nicholas Blomley is a Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University. He has a long standing interest in legal geography, particularly in relation to property. Dr. Blomly is interested in the spatiality of legal practices and relationships, and the worldmaking consequences of such legal geographies. Much of his empirical work concerns the often oppressive effects of legal relations on marginalized and oppressed people. Recent and current research projects, often in collaboration with others, include a) the analysis of ‘rental precarity’ in Greater Vancouver; b) the study of court-imposed ‘red zones’ imposed on street-involved people and protestors in Montreal and Vancouver; c) the dispossession of Japanese-Canadians in the 1940s; d) a community-based project creating tenant-led research into precarious housing conditions in Vancouver’s most vulnerable population and e) the governance of poor people’s possessions by private and public regulators in Canadian cities.

Dr. Blomley is also trying to unpack the relationship between territory and property, and is interested in the practice of urban commoning. His past research has focused on topic such as gentrification, panhandling, urban gardening, and indigenous-state treaties.

Marina Chavez, Graduate Student

Marina Chavez is a Master’s student in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. She is focused on understanding the law’s role in the regulation and social construction of poverty.  Marina has worked in research and activism on homeless encampment enforcement in the Sacramento/ Bay Area regions of California. The experiences in California paired with that of her own family led her to pursue a Master’s degree at SFU where she could use her experience to continue to advocate and collaborate with activists seeking housing and economic justice. Currently, she is working on a project related to the regulation of SRO Tenant possessions in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Her goal is to pursue transparent peer-based research that centers participant voices to understand how home is constructed and threatened through personal possessions.

Claire Shapton, Graduate Student

Claire Shapton is a Master’s student in the Geography Department at Simon Fraser University interested in the intersections of housing justice, feminist ecologies, animals, and governance. She began to explore community engaged research as an intern and researcher with an anti-displacement movement in her home of Portland, Oregon. Her current academic work analyzes the logics of property and multi-species housing precarity in Abbotsford, BC.