Tiffany Muller Myrdahl

Tiffany is thrilled to be in residence as the Junior Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Gender and Urban Studies, 2012-15. Tiffany completed her PhD in Geography and a certificate in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2008. Since 2008, she has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies and an associate member of the Department of Geography at the University of Lethbridge. She is on leave from the University of Lethbridge during her tenure as the Junior RWW Chair.

Tiffany’s research links urban, social, and feminist geography with a focus on social inclusion and feminist praxis. She employs a community-engaged qualitative research practice to examine the social and spatial processes that constitute and shape cities. Her scholarship has attended to the spatial logics of sport-centred urban entrepreneurial policies; the social geographies and mobilities of marginalized communities, with an emphasis on women and LGBTQ populations; the relationship between urban contexts (histories, economies, and cultural politics) and the formation of gender and sexual subjectivities and communities; and the intersection between municipal social policy and planning praxis. Her academic publications can be found in Gender, Place and Culture; Social & Cultural Geography; Journal of Lesbian Studies; Leisure/Loisir; Leisure Studies; and ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (forthcoming). Her recent work also includes chapters in Queerying Planning: Challenging Heteronormative planning practice (Ashgate, 2011) and in Stadium Worlds: Football, Space and the Built Environment (Routledge, 2010).

Tiffany’s current research combines critical analyses of urban policy with the development of a queer oral history archive and an examination of the socio-spatial formations of LGBTQ identities. She uses oral history methodologies and analyses of urban social policy and participatory planning schemes to understand urban change in Lethbridge, Alberta. This project, entitled "The lives of (sexual) others: social difference and urban change in Lethbridge, Alberta," is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Lethbridge, and has been supported by the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, where Tiffany was in residence during spring 2012.

As Junior RWW Chair, Tiffany will be teaching, writing, and organizing events around the theme of feminist urban futures. The first component of this program is Tiffany’s fall course, the Advanced RWW Seminar. You can read about and participate in the course here: http://tmullermyrdahl.org/rww-seminar-homepage/. The course website includes lecture and discussion materials, texts, and links to many additional sources that explore questions of and experiments in urban social inclusion. (More links are always welcome!) You don’t need to be enrolled in the course to participate in the online conversation.

Tiffany will also be participating with the Women Transforming Cities initiative throughout the year: http://womentransformingcities.org/. You can meet her at WTC events and at RWW events, which will be announced here and at the RWWP current activities website: http://www.sfu.ca/gsws-archive/community-outreach/current-wwp-activities.html