番茄社区

Professional information & research interests

Dr. Sarah Marie Wiebe grew up on Coast Salish territory in British Columbia, BC. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the 番茄社区 and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa with a focus on community development and environmental sustainability.

She is a Co-Founder of the FERN () Collaborative and has published in journals including New Political Science, Citizenship Studies and Studies in Social Justice. Her book  (2016) with UBC Press won the  (2017) and examines policy responses to the impact of pollution on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation's environmental health.

Alongside  (Virginia Tech), she is the Co-Editor of  and along with  (Guelph), the Co-Editor of Creating Spaces of Engagement: Policy Justice and the Practical Craft of Deliberative Democracy. At the intersections of environmental justice and citizen engagement, her teaching and research interests emphasize political ecology, policy justice and deliberative dialogue.

As a collaborative researcher and filmmaker, she worked with Indigenous communities on sustainability-themed films including . She is currently collaborating with artists from Attawapiskat on a project entitled  funded through a SSHRC Insight Development Grant. Sarah is also a Co-Director for the , funded through a SSHRC Insight Grant with research partners from the 番茄社区, University of British Columbia and coastal Indigenous communities.

Research interests/active areas of student recruitment

• Environmental justice, sustainability politics and policies, environmental politics and theory, critical ecofeminism, gender and the environment, climate emergencies, climate change
  
• Public engagement, deliberative democracy, grounded theory
  
• Critical policy studies, governmentality studies, Intersectionality-based policy analysis
  
• Biopolitics, health policy and politics, reproductive health and justice
  
• Interpretive research and arts-based methods, political ethnography, critical discourse analysis, mixed media storytelling
  
• Crisis, disaster and emergency planning, preparedness and response
  
• Indigenous community engagement and governance

I supervise students in the MPA, MACD and PhD programs and am currently supporting students with their thesis projects on topics and approaches such as: environmental justice, community-engaged research, critical policy studies, interpretive policy analysis, intersectionality-based policy analysis, policy justice, deliberative democracy, collaborative governance, planetary health, food democracy, shellfish revitalization, Indigenous community-engagement, water governance, critical ocean governance, natural resource management, DRIPA implementation, grounded governance, grounded normativity, interactive storytelling, emergency management and climate displacement.

Examples of successfully completed thesis projects that I’ve supervised include:

Ground truthing: An exploration of Ancestral Governance in Nuxalk homelands, Caitlin Thompson, MACD program, 2024

Neighbourhood Food Democracy: Participatory Food Asset Mapping in Vancouver’s Westside, Ksenia Stepkina, MACD program, 2024

The Beauty Underneath: Revitalizing Indigenous Shellfish Harvest in Semiahmoo Bay, Christy Juteau, MACD program, 2023

Informed by the prismatic and layered lenses of interpretive analysis, policy justice and participatory policy-making, my research explores the entanglements between citizens, policies and ecosystems. In general terms, my research interests are oriented around four areas of inquiry.

First, I examine how public policies affect situated communities and citizens, and how these citizens encounter, resist, respond to political forces in their everyday lives. My current work examines how environmental justice public policies - or the lack of such policies - affect Indigenous peoples in Canada. To address apparent gaps in policy-making, I am interested in the politics of citizen engagement and creative deliberative dialogue.

Second, to evaluate these policies, entanglements, engagements and encounters between affected parties and decision-makers, I employ a critical policy studies approach. From a sensing policy framework, I suggest that policy-makers will be better-equipped to explore alternative forms of communication and reflect diverse voices through creative public engagement.

As discussed in my book  and in the journal article  sensing policy entails recognition that policy-making is a multi-dimensional process, which necessarily involves recognition of: citizen's lived-experiences, situated bodies of knowledge, multi-layered analysis and geopolitical location.

Third, to connect this sensing policy framework to practice, I draw from tools of arts-based participatory action research to document, visualize and give presence to embodied encounters between citizens and politics through a multi-layered analysis, scaled from the global to the intimate. This approach engages with tools of participatory governance and deliberative dialogue.

Fourth, contributing both to the theory and practice of environmental justice scholarship, I am particularly interested in interrogating political encounters at the biopolitical and geopolitical nexus, to explore human/more-than-human relations in order to expand debates in environmental political theory, ecofeminist thought and deliberative democracy.

In all the work that I do, I attempt to challenge extractivism and centre a caring, embodied approach to research, teaching and engagement. I tend to ask political questions such as: what vital and geopolitical forces are at stake in the citizen's everyday experiences living in compromised environments? How do officials represent the experiences of those most directly affected by environment, health and natural resource policies? In what ways might these relationships be thought of and felt otherwise to enable healthy, vibrant and environmentally sustainable futures.

For additional research and publications, see: