My research – past, present and future – inhabits the intersections among political ecology, cultural geography, environmental humanities and animal studies. Each of the research projects I describe below is, in some way, concerned with the stakes of our cultural understandings of nature, not only as a biophysical entity but a container for all manner of human desires and anxieties.  My research over the past 10 years has approached these stakes in different ways, from thinking about Disney’s role as a cultural powerhouse, to bringing the wooly mammoth back to life. In the end, what I seek to elaborate in each of these projects is a critical rethinking of notions of nature such that we can begin to craft new relationships between humans and nonhumans based on mutual flourishing, affirmation, and justice.  

Wolves and the Making of Canada

Broadly, my current research project considers the way in which the natural world becomes a space of political calculation; more specifically, I am working with the notion of wolves as agents in shaping history, policy and discourse. As such, this project brings together environmental policy, wolf biology, Canadian studies, animal geographies and environmental history to think about how wolves have figured in making of the Canadian nation. What this project tries to understand is how the wolf has always been implicated in the formation of Canada, first as a physical threat to traders and settlers, next as an invader that stole land, livestock and resources, and finally as a source of national pride, an exemplar of wilderness and a subject of conservation measures to regulate its own well being. Drawing together examples from trappers accounts, government archives, popular literature and scientific scholarship, I chart the ways that wolves have moved from villain to vermin to wildlife ambassador, but nonetheless remain a focal point for specific kinds of regulation. In so doing, I explore the trajectory, extent, and limits of this reimagining of the wolf in Canada.  

This work has now been published in the book Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada with McGill-Queen’s University Press (2022). See cover below!