Episode 1.4: Environmental Racism & Justice in Canada

Episode 4: Environmental Racism & Justice in Canada


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Racism and colonialism are deeply entrenched in the field of ecopolitics. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Andil Gosine, professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, and Tzazná Miranda Leal, Workers Rights Organizer and Community Artist with Justice For Migrant Workers about the ways in which racism is woven throughout Canadian environmental history and its impacts on Canadian environmental policy and research.


Guest

Andil Gosine
Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University

Guest Bio

Guest

Tzazná Miranda Leal
Workers Rights Organizer and Community Artist, Justice For Migrant Workers

Guest Bio

Host

Ryan M. Katz-Rosene
Assistant Professor, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa

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Guest Bios

Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts & Justice at York University, Toronto. Dr. Gosine’s scholarship and artistic and curatorial practices examine imbrications of ecology, desire and migration, and include numerous publications and multimedia projects, including his forthcoming monograph, Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke). Recent exhibitions of his work include rêvenir (Port of Spain, 2020), Deities, Parts I & II (New York in 2019), and Coolie Coolie Viens and All the Flowers (various, Canada, 2018). He is curator of the current retrospective exhibition, Wendy Nanan at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Gosine co-authored Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction with Professor Cheryl Teelucksingh (Ryerson).

Tzazná Miranda Leal is a labour rights organizer and visual artist originally from Mexico and based in Toronto. Hailing from Morelos, a source of power for the Mexican revolution, art and social movements set the context for Tzazná’s life and work. For the past 14 years, Tzazná has organized for change in the rights of migrant, undocumented and precarious workers in Canada. They have also supported tenant struggles in the downtown Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale, where they led their own neighbours in a fight against unjust rent increases and evictions. As a visual artist, they have used illustration to document some pivotal moments in the decade and a half of farmworker organizing they participated in. Tzazná just graduated from a Masters at the York Faculty of Environmental Studies where they continued the work of creating an illustrated history of migrant farm worker organizing in Canada. Currently they are leading a group of trans and queer BIPOC artists to create ceramic sculptural work about their experiences living with chronic pain, illness and disability. They also work as a union organizer in Toronto and across Ontario.   

justicia4migrantworkers.org