Blog

I spent about 12 years working on this book and started studying the Rwanda and Congo wars about 17 years ago. America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo is published by Palgrave Macmillan in June 2020. Here’s the blurb: This book examines US interventions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda […]

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. I wrote Siegebreakers because I can’t liberate Gaza or Palestine, but I can dream about it. I wanted it to be a proximate dream, a dream of the next step from now, not a distant dream that depends on too many unpredictable things going right. […]

Rick Mercer's rant on my colleague Felipe Montoya's case. Felipe's family has been denied permanent residency because Canadian Immigration has deemed his 13-year old child, Nico, "inadmissible". Rick says what many of us are feeling, but as only he can: https://www.facebook.com/rickmercerreport/videos/10153482686097196/

I mentioned in my previous blog post that I just read NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. It's a book by journalists that summarizes psychological research about children, mainly about how they learn. So, it's of interest to educators, and I got a few things out of it, and I have a few critiques of it […]

A colleague of mine passed me an article by Ron Srigley in the Walrus, which is apparently making the rounds. Srigley argues that because university education is a credential and not something undertaken for its own sake, its value is decreasing. He argues that the management and administrative side of the university is increasing its […]

Any readers of this blog know that I spent my sabbatical in 2013 in Delhi, India, teaching at Jamia Millia Islamia. At the time, I spent time with faculty and students from two other excellent universities in Delhi, Delhi University (DU) and Jawarhalal Nehru University (JNU). As I write, there are very serious concerns about […]

Thanks to a partnership between York and the University of Toronto, under the Principal Investigator-ship of Susan Ruddick at U of T Geography, this past weekend saw a Habitecture Workshop held in Toronto. It brought together architects, ecologists, philosophers, social scientists, and practitioners to think about a city where wildlife and humans could coexist. The […]

I'm just reflecting on 2015 as a research year. In May, I presented some of the work we've been doing on urban wildlife at the Urban Wildlife Conference in Chicago, which was very exciting. I've also been working with my PhD student, Tracy Timmins, on various other aspects of the urban wildlife data, all as […]

Radical Teacher's 101st issue is about Teaching Across Borders. It includes an article by me about my summer teaching in Islamabad in 2008, at the International Islamic University - Islamabad, or IIU-I. A couple of weeks ago, I saw this article from a graduate of IIU-I, about the student's experience, and I thought it was […]

Enbridge's Line 9 is a controversial project that has generated opposition in the parts of Toronto that it is passing through. I looked and asked around for a shapefile or a KML file of the part of line 9 passing through Toronto, and couldn't get it, so I used Stop Line 9's approximate map to […]