EDI Inside the Academy

Seminars on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

A key objective of the Future Energy Systems integrated equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) plan is to encourage FES community members to see EDI as an integral, healthy, and welcome part of productive workplaces. We support our community members’ efforts to create safe spaces for all to contribute freely and openly to scientific progress, and this involves supporting ongoing learning in EDI.

In this series, EDI experiences and insights from within the specialized sector of academia will be explored. Speakers will be professors, researchers, and administrators from inside the world of research, sharing the EDI lessons from their environments, best practices, and advice they've gained from either researching topics related to EDI or their EDI experiences as members of the academy. Participants will have the opportunity to compare EDI experiences, interpret similarities and differences, and gather unique insights that can be applied to research, teaching, and learning activities.

Speakers

Find below a list of upcoming and past speakers. If you have any suggestions or requests for future speakers, please contact the Future Energy Systems team.

Deondre Smiles

Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Victoria,

22 November, 2021 at 13:30-15:00 PM Mountain Time

The current climate crisis in which we find ourselves has deep, lasting effects on the land, on the people who live on the land, and for the more-than-human beings that also share the land and environment. Processes of capitalism and settler colonialism have driven anthropogenic change upon the land, but Indigenous nations have proven to be adaptive and resilient to such anthropogenic change. In this talk, I will briefly outline anthropogenic drivers of land and environmental degradation, as well as the ways that Indigenous nations around the world have taken action to adapt and mitigate the effects of such degradation.

Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Victoria. Deondre is a geographer whose research interests are multifaceted, including Indigenous geographies/epistemologies, human-environmental interaction, political ecology, and tribal cultural resource preservation/protection. He currently serves as the Chair of the Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG); He is also a member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and the Canadian Association of Geographers. (CAG), and serves as a member of the editorial board of the journal Native American and Indigenous Studies.