I teach in the areas of human-animal relations, environmental ethics, environmental politics and the cultural politics of nature.

Current Courses

ERST-CAST-POST 2525: Critical Environmental Thinking: Many of the most difficult environmental issues we face are ‘wicked’ problems, ones withcomplex roots, conflicting values, and a great deal of uncertainty. They also often have a range of non-environmental factors that influence decision-making, like economic, political, and social drivers for action – or inaction. Being able to understand and evaluate different stakeholder positions in environmental conflicts makes us better able to understand how we might moveforward with solutions that are equitable both for people and nature. In this class, we explore what critical thinking is and why it’s so often hard to employ when wethink about environmental issues. We then turn to a variety of polarized cases in environmental politics to understand multiple viewpoints, evaluate claims, assess evidence, and determine howwe might develop effective arguments for change.

ERST-PHIL 3301: Environmental Ethics: This course provides a consideration of the moral dimensions of human/nonhuman relationships. We will critically examine a range of systems of thought that address such ethical questions, including radical ecologies, Indigenous teachings, ecocentrism and virtue ethics, with specific cases to make each philosophical orientation more concrete. We end with a section that deals explicitly with the ethical dimensions of ecological restoration.

ERST-PHIL-SAFS 3302: Animals and Society: This course provides students with an introduction to animal studies. We begin with a consideration of the how the divide between humans and animals has been constructed, and also how that divide has been unsettled by scholarship in ethology. We then turn to the various ways our society uses animals— as food, clothing, entertainment, companionship, for research—and examine the stakes of these relationships for both humans and nonhumans. We end the course by thinking about animal rights, animal protection, and posthumanist approaches to the lives of animals.

Graduate Students

I am pleased to accept students in a variety of graduate programs at Trent (Canadian and Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sustainability Studies) at the MA and PhD level with interests in:

  • human-animal studies

  • urban wildlife

  • environmental justice

  • nature and nation

  • critical conservation studies