News

Sustainability has reached its tipping point. With climate change and global warming causing worldwide environmental degradation – and disproportionately affecting marginalized peoples and regions – an increased push is occurring for products, packaging, and industrial practices to become more sustainable and to create less waste.

That’s where researchers such as born-and-raised in India Dr. Manjusri Misra come in. She’s providing cutting-edge training and opportunities for our world to become much more environmentally conscious, moving forward.

Campus proposed in Brampton’s new Centre for Innovation

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University of Guelph's Visiting International Research Student (VIRS) program has resumed.

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Gagne's book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas was awarded the 2019 James Fisher Prize for First Books on the Himalayan Region! https://anhs-himalaya.org/awards/fisher-prize

In academia, there is often a perceived separation of science and social science, with people expected to focus on one or the other. Elisa Cooper, a MSc candidate at the University of Guelph, made a leap by combining benefits of different fields from her undergraduate education in Water Resources Engineering (also at the University of Guelph) with her master's in Capacity Development and Extension.

Research usually begins with a quest to learn something about others. But in my case, I learned something about myself at the same time. In 2019, I was fortunate to spend a month talking to people with disabilities (PWD) in Delhi and Lucknow. This was part of a larger research project conducted by two think tanks, LIRNEasia in Sri Lanka and Vihara Innovation Network in India that were keen to understand how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can improve the life conditions of PWD.

In the third year of her International Development degree, Chloe Zivot was offered a unique opportunity, to become an intern at the Office of the Advisor to the Supreme Court of India appointed Commission on the Right to Food. She had the opportunity to live in India’s capital, New Delhi, for four months, and truly immerse herself in Indian culture.

The search for new knowledge often takes a researcher down a fascinating path. For example, when feminist Geography and Development researcher Dr. Josie Wittmer was in India gathering information for her doctoral thesis, Women's work in the 'clean city': Perspectives on well-being, waste governance, and inclusion from the urban margins in Ahmedabad India, she expected to engage with women waste-pickers on their own perceived wellbeing (in contrast to accounts of waste worker’s biological determinants of health). Women waste-picker participants in her study also wanted to talk about changes in their everyday work activities, which were resulting from emerging policies and urban planning initiatives.

Water is an element, so its scarcity is more likely due to poor management than it simply disappearing. Dr. Bharat Punjabi, a Research Fellow at the Global Cities Institute at the University of Toronto, ponders India’s growing water scarcity at a picturesque, lush and expansive farmland outside Mumbai, India, where problems stemming from uninformed policy and governance is affecting farmers’ livelihoods.

Social change conjures up an array of topics: politics, activism and development, among them. But what about music, or theatre? How do these art forms connect with activism and social change?