CBRCanada Webinar: Moving the Dial On: Co-Creating Just Sustainabilities

Community-Based Research Canada presents “Moving the Dial”: our 2023 E-Learning series. This series will highlight action-oriented community-based research that is ‘moving the dial’ on today’s pressing societal challenges. An important hallmark of community-based research, taking an action-orientated and impactful approach, means research partnerships mobilizing knowledge and mobilizing communities towards positive societal change. The research projects highlighted within this series demonstrate impact of community-based research. We will hear about research partnerships that facilitated actions improving societal conditions, including changes in policies, systems, organizations, and communities where everyone is supported and belongs.

Webinar

Campus-community partnerships are well positioned to play a role in advancing social and environmental justice in the context of our rapidly changing and increasingly inequitable world. Across the Global North, post-secondary institutions in partnership with civil society organizations and communities are engaging in efforts to establish living labs by integrating research, teaching, and community engagement to advance regenerative social-ecological systems. Living labs aim to co-create innovative solutions to complex challenges through interdisciplinary, placed-based experiential learning and community-engaged action in the built and natural environments. In this presentation, we reflect on our collective experiences working with the Lake Superior Living Labs Network (LSLLN), a nested network of living labs collaborating across the Lake Superior watershed. The LSLLN was established in 2018 as a platform to connect academics and community groups in Canada, the United States and across multiple Indigenous territories, with the goal of developing and expanding partnerships and place-based collaborative initiatives grounded in the Lake Superior watershed as a social-ecological system.  Drawing on these insights, we share highlights from our collective work in each of the regions, watershed scale projects that we have developed through our collaborations, and their potential to establish connections and increase the impact of place-based activities focused on social and environmental justice and sustainability.  See: www.livinglabsnetwork.org

Presenters

Charles Levkoe, Canada Research Chair in Equitable and Sustainable Food Systems, Lakehead University . Charles' community engaged research uses a food systems lens to better understand the importance of, and connections between social justice, ecological regeneration, regional economies and active democratic engagement. Working directly with a range of scholars and community-based practitioners across North America and Europe, Charles studies the evolution of the broader collective of social movement networks that views the right to food as a component of more sustainable futures. Mobilizing his existing partnerships, Charles integrates his research and teaching through community engaged learning pedagogies and supports students, community-partners and scholars to be actively involved in knowledge co-generation. Through community-based, action-oriented inquiry and teaching and the development of placed-based action projects, his research contributes to critical discussions that inform theory, civil society action and public policy

Lindsay Galway, Canada Research Chair in Social-Ecological Health, Lakehead University. Lindsay is an interdisciplinary health researcher trained in public health and environmental health. Her work spans the social, natural, and health sciences and aims to bring together multiple perspectives in order to comprehensively understand, and collaboratively address, complex social-ecological challenges, with a focus on climate change. Using an interdisciplinary, applied, and community-engaged approach, her current research activities focus on three core areas: (1) Investigating the impacts of climatic and environmental change on health and wellbeing; (2) Using place-based approaches to respond to, and address, climatic and environmental change in ways that promote sustainability, health, and social justice; and (3) Supporting integration, transdisciplinary research, and intersectoral action through methodological and practical innovations.

*This event is intended for CBRCanada members only. If you are employed, studying, or affiliated with any CBRCanada member institution/organization, you are already considered a member. If you are unsure if your institution is covered, learn more here. Individuals whose institution is not on this list are welcome to register as an an individual member. We value community participation and have a free membership option for registered community mobilizers.