Thomasina Pidgeon is pursuing a master’s degree in Human Geography. She is interested in how people who live in vehicles are positioned and regulated in society and how they push back against capital and colonial dominant understandings of home and property. Thomasina has lived semi-nomadically in a van since 1998 and is co-founder of the Vehicle Residency of Squamish, an advocacy group for vehicle residents that aims to overturn the no-camping bylaw.
Naomi Keenan O’Shea is a PhD student, interested in the dynamics of property relations in liberal capitalist and settler colonial contexts and how they are lived through gendered and racialized relations of power. She is particularly interested in exploring how (post)colonial and capitalist logics enmesh with the Catholic Church to produce specific forms of propertied power in the context of Ireland.
Danielle Kerrigan is a postdoctoral fellow in Geography. Her work focuses on the legal, cultural, and political frameworks shaping landlord-tenant relations. Her dissertation was a comparative examination of landlordism with field sites in Canada, Germany, and the USA. Ongoing collaborative work includes examining loopholes in eviction regulations, documenting short-term rentals' impact on rental housing, and pushing for more collective and social ownership of housing.
Marina Chavez is pursuing a master’s degree in human Geography with a focus on the regulation of poverty. She is specifically interested in trying to understand the Law’s role in the management and social construction of poverty as it relates to the built environment. As an undergraduate, she was involved in research relating to homelessness in the United States and seeks to use her past experiences to inform on her research going forward. Her goal is to use her research as a mechanism for activism and social understanding.
Terri Evans is a PhD student in Geography with research interests relating to the regulation of the homeless and precariously housed. In particular, Terri is interested in homeless tent settlements as contested spaces where state actors and agents attempt to regulate the structures, people, and behaviours associated with this informal form of housing, and where supporters offer resistance.
Tara Jankovic is pursuing a masters in Human Geography. Working with tenants through the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House and Vancouver Tenants Union, her research explores precarity in the private rental housing market in Vancouver. Focusing on the proliferation of no-fault evictions (caused by a landlord wanting to use, sell, or redevelop property), she is interested in how tenants experience and navigate precarious property relations in increasingly financialized housing markets.
Alain LeTourneau is pursuing an MA in Human Geography. His research explores various agency-oriented or bottom-up approaches to affordable urban housing, specifically British Columbia's rental housing co-operatives; North American co-housing as it appears in Portland, Oregon in the U.S. and in Vancouver, Canada; as well as Northern European building groups in the Netherlands and Germany.
Natalia Perez is a PhD scholar in Geography investigating the material and symbolic effects that land property rights interventions have on social ordering, as well as in making –and remaking- space. She is particularly interested in exploring the effects of policies on land restitution, formalization and rural development in an agrarian frontier located in the eastern plains of Colombia, known as the “Altillanura”, under a conflict and post-conflict context.