Amelia Ack (she/her)
Wachiay Friendship Centre

Amelia graduated with a BSc from the University of Victoria’s Geography Department in 2021. She is a settler on the territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples, and holds mainly Jewish ancestry, with her family tracing back to Eastern and Northern Europe.

Amelia works at the Victoria Native Friendship Centre as the Climate and Social Justice Coordinator in the Community Action and Learning Department. She supports the development and delivery of Indigenous-led learning programs that centre Indigenous ways of being and knowing and support reconciliation efforts. She is passionate about the more-than-human world and uplifting Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of relating to space. She is interested in research efforts to better understand the ways in which we can work in good relations with natural systems/processes to support the health of our environment and address the climate crisis.

M.Chen (she/her)
Independent Researcher, Maqlaqs Gaa’tkni (Oregon)

Chen is a law-trained ally, passionate about land-based grassroots advocacy through Legal Geography and Environmental Law with an Indigenous-centric approach. She has worked with the Diné people (mining, grazing, and land-use law), the Pueblo of Acoma (mining, cultural property, and land-use law), and the Klamath Tribes (salmon protection, transboundary environmental challenge, water law). Grew up in the foothills of the Himalaya, she came from an indigenous/ethnic minority group, the Jingpo people, in Northern Myanmar/Southwest China, nestled on the Himalaya Plateau. She is grateful to continue living in the ancestral homeland of the First People in North America and to work towards a coalition for indigeneity worldwide.

Matt Fuller (he/him)
PhD student, University of Victoria

Matt is a settler of Irish and mixed European ancestry living on the lands of the Upper Skagit, Swinomish and Samish Peoples. He graduated with a BA and Master of Environmental Studies from The Evergreen State College and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria. Matt is a critical geographer and political ecologist whose research explores environmental injustices, settler solidarities, and art as social change-making. He has worked with the Lummi Nation House of Tears Carving family for ten years, supporting their campaigns and the Totem Pole Journeys they lead. He currently works for the Department of Ecology in Washington and has a background in community media, non-profit administration and environmental communication. Matt is a long-time musician, radio host and journalist who loves contributing to the telling of local stories and the lifting of community arts and identities.

Dr. Alexandra Giancarlo (she/her)
Associate Professor, Kinesiology, University of Calgary

Alexandra Giancarlo, PhD, is a settler scholar and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary, where she applies her broad social sciences training (PhD cultural-historical geography, Queen’s University) to socio-cultural studies of sport and physical activity. The bulk of her work comprises community-engaged research with residential school survivors and their families focusing on histories that examine the impact of sports and recreation on cultural identity. Most recently, she entered into a multiyear partnership with the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation to research and construct a community sports hall of fame.

Jugal Patel (he/him)
Esri

Jugal is a member of the GIF Collaboratory, and a Geographer and Product Engineer II at Esri Inc. Jugal’s research focuses on participatory agent-based models of socio-ecological complex adaptive systems, computational movement analysis, computer-human interaction, and human and animal ecology. As a research associate Jugal is developing community-determined simulations of socio-ecological interactions, in hopes of enabling self-determination of Indigenous people and their land, and socio-ecological resilience. Bringing with him a history of developing custom, full-stack data analytics and visualisation solutions across a variety of (local, nonprofit, and multinational corporate) organisations, Jugal is well-equipped to implement analytical and geovisual products to help communities query, understand, and intervene on geographic issues.

Rhea (Emileigh) Pearson (She/They)
Master’s student, KU Leuven (Belgium)

Rhea is an alumni of the UVic Geography department, completing her BSc in Geography in 2022. She is also a settler of mixed european descent, who originally came to Victoria from the territories of the Stó:lō Nation and Treaty 7 territory.

She currently works full time as a GIS Officer with the Canadian Red Cross, focusing on improving open-source basemaps and involving communities across the country in mapping areas of local interest. She is passionate about disaster management, and how open-source mapping can support community-based preparedness for and response to these events. In 2021, she participated in wildfire responses to the White Rock Lake and Lytton Creek fires, and also worked closely with communities impacted by the floods that same year.

Rhea is also very interested in exploring the influence of the urban environment on perceptions of safety in minority groups, natural processes, and how mapping can be adapted to accommodate and grow to the needs of Indigenous users and their knowledge systems.

Melinda Quintero (she/her)
Associate Faculty, School of Tourism & Hospitality Management
Royal Roads University

Melinda has been editing travel guidebooks since the early 2000s and holds a Master of Arts in Tourism Management degree from Royal Roads University. Her academic interest explores the intersection between tourism, colonization, truth, and reconciliation – specifically examining the role of maps and cartography in perpetuating colonial narratives. Her fascination with maps can be traced through fond memories of her father, an urban planner who would quiz her about the streets of Los Angeles using a Thomas Guide. Melinda is Chicana from Los Angeles, California, currently living, working, and teaching in the lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking Peoples, the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations.

Razz R. (They/Them)
Independent Researcher, Algonquin Territory

Razz is a white, queer, disabled, settler living and working on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe in so-called ‘Ottawa’. They have an academic background in Geography, Computer Science and Indigenous Studies, and currently work on a variety of projects related to data management and sovereignty.

Their primary research interest is in how settler researchers and tech-workers can build relationships with Indigenous communities to support their continuous work towards control and self-determination over their lands and their data. Additionally, they are interested in how Indigenous sovereignty and authority over land and data can help grow partnerships to support a livable and just future for all beings on this planet.

Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) (He/They/Wiin)
Adjunct Professor, Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability
University of British Columbia
(Fall 2026: Incoming Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies, Bemidji State University)

I’m an Indigenous geographer whose research interests lie at the intersection of several fields, including critical Indigenous geographies, human-environment interactions, political ecology, tribal cultural resource preservation, and science and technology studies.

My current research centres on investigating the political ecologies and political economies of Indigenous death and of Indigenous relationships to space more broadly. I work to understand how the settler colonial state conceives of the political agency of Indigenous death and investigate connections between ‘traditional’ cultural resource management, such as burial grounds/site protection and preservation, and protection of the living environment, including more-than-human kin (animals, plants, water). I argue these processes ultimately shed light on how new political possibilities can be created for all living things, humans and more-than-human alike, in an era of climate crisis. This work is part of a broader, years-long research agenda focusing on Indigenous/settler contestations over Indigenous remains and burial grounds.

Anna Soer (she/her)
Ph.D. student, University of Ottawa

My name is Anna Soer. I am a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa in political science. My research focuses on renewable energy development in Nunavut, with special attention to community engagement, gender, and (epistemological) governance. 

I am an international student in Canada, my mother coming from Brittany (France) and my father from Drenthe (the Netherlands), and I moved here in 2021. My life experiences as a migrant while having deep attachments to the lands of my parents inform my scholarship and how I relate to land governance and epistemology. 

While I mostly devote my time to my thesis, other research areas include white supremacy and white femininity in a (historical and contemporary) settler colonial context, security in the Arctic, as well as circumpolar development and relations. 

I currently live in Kingston, Ontario – homeland of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Huron-Wendat First Nations – with my wife, puppy, and two cats.

Emma Wolton (she/her)
PhD student, Institut Agro Rennes-Angers, Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS)

I am an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of cultural geography and environmental philosophy. My research examines the emotional impacts of environmental and climate change, with a particular focus on solastalgia(Albrecht, 2005)—the psychological distress experienced by individuals and communities when their environment is degraded.

My dissertation explores how solastalgia manifests across diverse cultural contexts. Specifically, my fieldwork in Sweden and Arizona examines how the Sami and Tohono O’odham Indigenous communities—both resisting mining exploitation—experience environmental degradation. The main objective of my work is to refine the concept of solastalgia by understanding its varied impacts on different communities, from Indigenous to Western. I investigate how cultural practices, experiences, and representations of place influence emotional responses to environmental change.

Lab Alumni:

Since its founding in 2021, the Collaboratory has been fortunate to have many excellent members. The alumni below were key to our success and remain valued parts of our collective, even after moving on to great things.

Dr. Yvonne Coady
Dr. James Juip
Dr. Larissa Juip
Owen Lee
Christine Todd
Dr. Maya Weeks