Jocelyn Thorpe

My research draws from critical race, feminist, and environmental studies scholarship to examine the history and legacies of, as well as challenges to, colonialism in the Canadian context. I seek to understand how past discourses and relationships of power lead to and naturalize present-day social and environmental inequities, and to open up possibilities for more just relationships among humans and between humans and the non-human world in which we live.

My current major project, "Lost Encounters in the 'New-Found-Land,'" is supported by a five-year SSHRC Insight Grant (2013–2018). It explores the history of present-day relationships among Indigenous and non-Indigenous Newfoundlanders and the territory they have come to share, with the goals of: contributing a detailed analysis of a little-known history; advancing scholarly understandings of the workings of colonialism, including its relationship with the non-human world; and contributing to decolonizing relationships among humans and between humans and the rest of the world. Together with Newfoundland Mi'kmaq artist Joanna Barker, I am currently working on the oral history component of the research.

With my colleagues Stephanie Rutherford at Trent University and L. Anders Sandberg at York University, I recently completed co-editing a book called Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research. The collection grapples with challenges of how to study human-environment relationships over time, and provides insight from scholars working in diverse geographical and theoretical contexts. Additionally, I am the author of Temagami's Tangled Wild: Race, Gender, and the Making of Canadian Nature, which studies the history of how Teme-Augama Anishnabai territory in Ontario came to be understood by non-Indigenous people as a site of wild Canadian nature, and the efforts of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai over time to enact their own relationships to their homeland.