Lake Superior Living Labs Network
The Lake Superior Living Labs Network (LSLLN) is a platform connecting academics and community groups across the Lake Superior watershed & developing collaborative initiatives at the intersection of water, food, land, climate, energy, and individual and community will being.
Participatory Food Systems Governance
The Participatory Food Governance project aims to identify effective and collaborative approaches to building healthy, equitable, and sustainable food systems.
The Indigenous Food Circle
The Indigenous Food Circle aims to reduce Indigenous food insecurity, increase food self-determination and establish meaningful relationships with the settler population through food.
Understanding Our Food Systems
Understanding Our Food Systems is a participatory, community-engaged and action focused project led by fourteen First Nation communities in Northwestern Ontario.
Agroecology and Seed Sovereignty in Northern Ontario
This partnership with the Lakehead University Agricultural Research Station (LUARS) works with researchers, farmers, non-profit organizations and small businesses to pilot a series of ecological seeds trials. Using farmer-led and community-based research, this project focuses on food sovereignty and agroecology and aims to improve knowledge, skills and capacity to produce healthy and sustainable food in Northwestern Ontario.
Exploring Food and Fishery Systems in the Lake Superior Region
Focusing on the Lake Superior region of Canada and the United States, the Exploring Food and Fishery Systems in the Lake Superior Region research aims to support social and ecological sustainability in the region’s fisheries by better understanding and mapping their connections with local food systems.
Lake Superior Our Helper: Stories from Batchewanaung Anishinabek Fisheries
Lake Superior Our Helper follows Chief Dean Sayers through a series of conversations with community members to reveal the cultural, political, and ecological relationships surrounding their fisheries. Inviting us on a journey of Lake Superior, the film shares the messages of Elders, youth, fishers, community leaders, and their visions for the future of Batchewana’s fisheries. It also documents how fishing has changed over time, conflicts with the state around management and regulation, principles of Indigenous law, and the culture and ceremony that are deeply embedded within fishing practices.
Common Ground Network
The Common Ground Network’s goal is to increase the accessibility and genuine use of social science and humanities (SSH) expertise in the strategic pursuit of sustainable agriculture, forestry, fisheries and food systems to support a just transition to a net-zero economy coast-to-coast-to-coast.
Thunder Bay and Area Food Strategy
The Thunder Bay and Area Food Strategy (TBAFS) aims to build healthy, equitable, and sustainable food systems that contribute to the economic, ecological, and social well-being and health of the city of Thunder Bay and Area. There are a number of ongoing active research projects with the TBAFS and its members.
Past Projects
The Antinomies of Non-Wage Labour in Ontario’s Food Movement and Agricultural Sector
The Antinomies of Non-Wage Labour in Ontario’s Food Movement and Agricultural Sector examines the role of non-waged labour (e.g. intern, apprentice and volunteer) on small- and medium-scale ecologically oriented farms.
Food: Locally Embedded, Globally Engaged (FLEdGE)
The FLEdGE Partnership builds on more than five years of evolving research partnerships with over seventy Canadian and International participants. We use research partnerships to explore the current and potential role of community food initiatives to act as pillars of regional, sustainable transformation. Our guiding themes for this work are integration, scaling up and innovative governance.
Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE)
CFICE is a research project that studies how community and campus players work together to positively impact their communities. Through community-driven projects, CFICE participants test community first approaches to community-campus engagement (CCE). These collaborative approaches build healthier, more democratic and longer-lasting community-campus relationships.
This project uses case studies to identify and document a spectrum of multifunctional social economy food activities where people trade/share material resources and skills at times in informal ways.
Agrobiodiversity, Nutrition and Sustainable Marketing of Heritage Crops in Ecuador and Canada (Canadian Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Advanced Scholars Program)