Distanced Community-Based Research Panel

Moderator:

Am Johal

Am Johal is Director of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and Co-Director of SFU's Community-Engaged Research Initiative.

Panelists:

Alissa Greer

Assistant Professor, School of Criminology, SFU

Dr. Alissa Greer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology. Her research is in the criminalization of social ‘problems’, community-police relations, and community involvement in harm reduction practice and drug policy. In all her work, she takes a critical lens and specializes in community engagement and community based participatory research methods. Alissa also enjoys cycling and fostering rescue dogs.

Jeff Masuda

Right to Remain

Associate Professor, School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, Queen's University

Jeff Masuda comes from a mixed settler family with Japanese Canadian and European ancestry and was raised in a middle-class community on the outskirts of the City of Edmonton in Treaty 6 territory. Over the years, Jeff was mentored toward a research and teaching career that is based in the academic fields of human geography and community health promotion. His research focuses on urban health equity, participatory action research, human rights, knowledge translation, homelessness and housing, and environmental health within urban Indigenous community contexts. When not in Vancouver for the Right to Remain, Jeff lives and works in Kingston, Ontario, located on the traditional Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory, with his partner Jennie, son Riel, and daughter Marion.

Scott Neufeld

Vanier Scholar and Social Psychology PhD Candidate

Scott Neufeld grew up on the unceded territory of the Kwantlen people (Langley, BC) and now lives and works in East Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He has an MA in Social Psychology from Simon Fraser University (SFU) and is currently completing a PhD in Social Psychology at SFU and the BC Centre on Substance Use. His dissertation employs a community-based participatory research approach to examine how race and class privilege shape how people who use drugs are represented in state-funded anti-stigma campaigns. He has also collaborated with Downtown Eastside community members to co-develop a Manifesto for Ethical Research in the DTES (https://bit.ly/R101Manifesto).

Samantha Pranteau

Community Organizer, Tenant Overdose Response Organizers (TORO)

Samantha Pranteau works as a Community Organizer for the Tenant Overdose Response Organizers (TORO) as well as in a number of other roles. In addition to working as a co-researcher with the Right to Remain, Sam is a member of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society (WAHRS), and other grassroots organizing in the Downtown Eastside. All of these roles involve forms of logistical, emotional, intellectual, and community-first labour that make Sam’s contributions to the various activist initiatives in which she is involved immeasurable. As an Indigenous woman, the particular perspectives and knowledge which shape Sam’s work in her community continuously call us to think seriously about what it means to respect community-led work, in research and beyond.

Claire Shapton

MA Student, Department of Geography, SFU

Claire Shapton is a Master’s student in the Geography Department at Simon Fraser University interested in the intersections of housing justice, feminist ecologies, animals, and governance. She began to explore community engaged research as an intern and researcher with an anti-displacement movement in her home of Portland, Oregon. Her current academic work analyzes the logics of property and multi-species housing precarity in Abbotsford, BC with the activist group the Drug War Survivors.