Project Background

Photo credit: Amanda Terfloth

With Mapping for Change, we aim to build a baseline of information about environmental injustice, and resistance to it, in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough as a means to intervene in and change these conditions. We are excited to offer you a freely accessible living digital archive of data, maps, images, and stories that will also be curated in collaboration with community members, organizations, students, and Trent University faculty.

The goal of this partnered research is to answer the following broad questions:

What forms does environmental injustice take in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough?

How is environmental harm racialized, gendered, and classed? How, and where, are organizations and communities responding to environmental injustice in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough?

Partnerships

This project draws together two partner organizations whose work is animated by an attention to justice, equity, inclusion, and environmental access. The Community Race Relations Committee of Peterborough (CRRC) and the Kawartha World Issues Centre (KWIC) will be directly involved in the design, direction, and implementation of the research goals.

These partner organizations working in tandem with our GIS and story mapping analysis on environmental injustice and resilience issues will provide valuable visual evidence of the hidden stories of environmental harm and resistance in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough.

  • CRRC was founded 40 years ago to encourage and promote anti-racism and equitable race and community relations throughout Nogojiwanong/Peterborough.

  • KWIC was founded in 1989 to engage in community education around sustainability and youth empowerment for change. Their funders include Ontario Trillum Foundation, the City of Peterborough, the Community Foundation of Greater Peterborough, and the United Way.

Key Objectives

  1. To understand, document, and visually depict through geographical information systems (GIS) mapping, how environmental inequality and disproportionate risk unfold spatially, both historically and contemporarily

  2. To analyze how policies, programs, and planning tools deepen and extend in environmental harm

  3. To surface and amplify how people experience and understand environmental harm in their neighbourhoods through participatory GIS, photovoice, and oral histories

  4. To explore the plurality of ways that individuals, organizations, and communities organize to address the consequences of environmental injustice and provide them with opportunities build connections and solidarities to organize for change

  5. To raise public awareness about environmental injustice in this region, through policy briefs, public-facing news articles, the project website, and the production and launch of a short film

  6. To use the data generated as part of this research project to effect policy change at the variety of levels, not just in terms of the distribution of environmental goods and bads, but more crucially in terms of structural change and access to decision-making.

Photo credit: Amanda Terfloth

Methodologies

We ground our research in the principles of community-based participatory action research, informed by a mixed-methods approach. This will be well suited to environmental justice research because researchers and community organizations can co-design the research agenda and seek to co-produce knowledge to effect social change. Learn more about our three main pillars:

  • In order to trace how environmental burdens have been felt and access to environmental amenities has changed through time, we will conduct a historical analysis of displacement, settlement and development patterns, treaty rights and responsibilities, industries, and city plans in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough. We seek to produce an environmental history of Nogojiwanong/Peterborough rooted in questions of justice, power, and equity with a focus on oral histories.

  • Mapping has become a key tool of environmental justice research and activism because it traces histories and contemporary manifestations of environmental marginalization. A key outcome of this project is to map and offer an open-access visual representation of what environmental injustice – and its inverse, environmental justice – look like in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough.

  • We need to centre the lived experience of (often marginalized) communities in their understanding of place, which can be hidden from a sole reliance on mapping. We will facilitate community-engaged research via methods of participatory GIS and intersectional oral histories, which will allow the people who live in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough to describe and map their own experience of place, any environmental injustices they may experience, and environmental and community assets from which they draw strength and resilience.