Dr Heather Castleden
Professor and Impact Chair in Transformative Governance for Planetary Health
Dr Heather Castleden (she/her) is the President’s Impact Chair in Transformative Governance for Planetary Health and a Full Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. She is a settler scholar, with ancestral roots in Scotland and England. Heather is trained as a human geographer, and she has been doing community-based participatory environmental, health, and governance research in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples for over two decades. She is a former Canada Research Chair (2016-2021), Fulbright Scholar (2020-2021), and an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists (2021-2028). She has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and commissioned reports, and delivered over 200 conference presentations and public lectures. Heather sits on several Editorial Boards for journals in her field and she is an active member of the Canadian Association of Geographers, where she launched a national Standing Committee on Decolonizing and Indigenizing the profession.
Heather was born in the territory of the Yellowknives Dene; she has lived in multiple Indigenous territories and having received teachings from many generous and patient Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Holders over several decades, she is grateful to now live and work, albeit uninvited, in the traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples of the Esquimalt and the Songhees Nations – and the SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples of the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations. Heather acknowledges, respects, and has deep appreciation for Indigenous Peoples’ close and continuing relationship to the land, and waters, air and all our other-than-human relations surrounding us. Heather is committed to a lifelong learning process of how to be a good guest in these territories. Shecommits to practices that address Indigenous-specific structural, systemic, and everyday violences of colonialism and racism. Heather is also committed to supporting Indigenous rights, resurgence, and self-determination.
Heather’s life partner, Jay, is of Ukrainian ancestry. Together they have raised two amazing young people, Dylan and Jordan. Their adult son, Dylan, provides environmental and experiential education programs for elementary and secondary students, delivering curriculum-based credit programs for students through canoe, hiking and kayak trips. Their teenage daughter, Jordan, is an environmental and social justice advocate, already an avid harvester of salvageable old clothes, repurposing them into unique fashions for family and friends. Heather’s family is lucky to have a four-legged in their lives, Bella, a loveable and goofy fox red lab. When Heather isn’t in the HEC Lab or doing community research or making podcasts from the comfort of her own living room, she can be found at one of the island’s many beaches, bakeries, or bistros. Heather is presently a self-declared failure at guitar and spreadsheets, but one day hopes to learn both!
Research Program
Navigating community-led research for planetary health.
My program of community-based social, health and environment research is primarily unified through:
1) participatory research with Indigenous partners concerning issues that are important to them;
2) shared development and testing of innovative qualitative research tools that adhere to Indigenous principles for decolonizing methodologies; and
3) engagement in studies concerning the ethical tensions and institutional barriers associated with community-based participatory research processes and outcomes.
Social, environmental, and health justice
I am interested in understanding Indigenous and non-Indigenous risk perspectives regarding social, environmental, and health impacts and adaptations in resource-dependent communities associated with environmental change. Particularly, I am concerned with how these perspectives are expressed and differentiated among and between stakeholders and decision-makers, and the implications these perspectives bring to bear on social-ecological communities.
Methodological innovation
My research stream on methodology takes, as its point of departure, the contributions of my doctoral research, in which I modified and subsequently evaluated the cultural applicability of using Photovoice, an innovative visual/oral research tool, to identify, document, and understand Indigenous environment and health perspectives. My postdoctoral program of study has involved training in and exploration of additional digital/visual methods. As an emerging methodologist, I am now testing digital storytelling as a method and dissemination tool in community-based research regarding the cultural, social, economic, and political implications of environmental change.
Ethics
Through my stream of research on ethics I am continuing to build on my postdoctoral studies through inquiry into the distinctive nature of ethics associated with community-based and participatory research. Key principles of both include shared decision-making power and ownership in all phases of the research, community capacity, mutual trust and learning between team members, and integrated knowledge disseminated for the mutual benefit of all partners. The tensions associated with these principles, particularly the ‘ethically significant moments’ that occur after an ethics review board gives its approval, are ever present and require constant attention through rigorous and reflexive research.
To summarize: My career trajectory is to build a program of integrated, methodologically- and ethically-sound community-based participatory research that combines these four streams in the context of coastal communities in Canada. My research is geared towards developing a response to these and other issues in a way that maintains my record of engaging in innovative scholarship that plans for and creates social and environmental change. I would describe my work as the product of a balancing act between academic engagement and advocacy.
Nurturing Future Leaders in Planetary Health and Social Justice
Graduate Supervision
Guiding the next generation of change-makers.
I am currently seeking graduate students with research interests that focus on:
- Community-based participatory research
- Decolonizing planetary health science
- Gendered perspectives in public health
- Environmental, social, and climate justice
- Energy, food, and water security
- Critical, participatory, and Indigenous methodologies
- Indigenous-led health projects
- Indigenous resurgence and land-based learning
- Modern treaties and UNDRIP in Canada
- Relational critiques of procedural ethics
- Responding to the TRC Calls to Action
If you are interested in applying to work with me in the HEC Lab at the University of Victoria, I encourage you to contact me with a one-page statement of interest explaining the synergies with my research, a current CV, a copy of your unofficial transcripts, as well as an exceptional piece of writing you would like to share.
Current Courses
ADMN 331: Governance For Planetary Health
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course provides students a foundational understanding of Planetary Health from an interdisciplinary lens. We focus on transformative governance strategies embracing the environmental, political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions to achieve high standards of health, well-being, equity and ecological prosperity. We will also explore pathways and policy solutions at the local, regional, national and global levels for reconciling natural and human systems.
ADMN 548: Governance For Planetary Health (Graduate Level)
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Our planet is in crisis and there is no Planet B. Students taking this course will gain foundational understandings of Planetary Health, drawing on Indigenous, western, and other knowledge systems. Students examine and compare current types of planetary health projects and governance structures, exploring the extent to which these projects and structures are supporting our abilities to achieve local-to-global social-ecological justice. Topics include: historiography of planetary health, socio-political power dynamics, relationality to the land, colonial violence, Indigenous resistance and resurgence, as well as pathways, policy solutions, and change-making action for Planetary Health.
CD501: Setting the Foundations for Community Change (Graduate Level)
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This graduate course lays the foundation for conceptualizing community change in the broader context of answering the calls for the UN’s sustainable development goals, truth and reconciliation, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and social-ecological justice. Students gain an understanding of the history of the field, and the social, political, and economic forces at play that contribute to shaping communities. The course explores a range of approaches to the theory and practice of community development, and students will grasp the ways in which different actors work to effect change and identify key issues and challenges when seeking to make positive recommendations, impacts, and outcomes for a wide range of communities.
