Dr. Heather Castleden
Professor
Impact Chair in Transformative Governance for Planetary Health
As a white settler scholar, having lived in multiple Indigenous territories and having received teaching from many generous and patient Indigenous Elders and Knowledge-Keepers, I am grateful to now live and work, albeit as an uninvited occupier, in the traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples: the Esquimalt, the Songhees and the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations. I acknowledge, respect, and have deep appreciation for their close and continuing relationship to the land and waters surrounding us and I am committed to a lifelong learning process of how to be a good guest here. That is, I commit to practices that address Indigenous-specific structural, systemic, and everyday violences of colonialism and racism. I also commit to supporting Indigenous rights, resurgence, and self-determination.
Graduate Supervision
I am currently seeking graduate students with research interests that focus on:
» Community-based participatory research
» Indigenous renewable energy in Canada
» Environmental racism and social justice
» Critical, participatory, and Indigenous methodologies
» Two-Eyed Seeing
» Indigenous health equity
» Treaty rights
» Modern treaty implementation
» Relational ethics
» Planetary Health
If you are interested in applying to work with me in the HEC Lab at Queen’s University, I encourage you to contact me with a statement of interest, an up to date copy of your CV, a copy of your unofficial transcripts, as well as an exceptional piece of writing you would like to share.
My Research Program
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.
(1) Social, Environmental, and Health Equity: I am particularly interested in understanding, comparing, and contrasting 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.
(2) 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.
(3) 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.
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