Dr. Leesa Fawcett, Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University.
Fawcett currently researches animal agency, and investigates natural history at the intersection of feminist science and technology studies, and human and political ecology. Her earliest ethological work addresses human-animal conflicts —humpback whales caught in fishing gear. Her later work was grounded in understanding gendered human relationships to common and familiar animals in terms of interspecies friendships and ethics of care and justice. Her SSHRC funded research on animal cognition and culture with whales and bats employed phenomenological and ethnographic approaches, and this continues into her on-going research on animal agency and perceptual worlds and the ethical/political contradictions of human interdependence with the natural world. Fawcett is looking at urban animal contact with humans in the Greater Toronto Area, including processes of predation, care and rescue, and habitat and migration issues with wildlife NGO’s, Fatal Light Awareness Project and the Toronto Wildlife Centre, (the largest centre in North America). Fawcett will present a paper at the proposed workshop and will assist in identifying artwork from York U for inclusion in the exhibition component.