From the Ontario government’s plan to reopen elementary and secondary schools across the province in September, to the Canadian government’s COVID-19 contact tracing app, scholars from a range of disciplines across the Faculty of Arts & Science are sharing their expertise on a variety of issues in the media.
Here’s some of what A&S scholars had to say this week.
July 31, 2020
Department of Political Science professor Nelson Wiseman comments on the Ontario government’s announcement of its framework for reopening schools in September, in the London Free Press. “We can’t tell if they’re doing a good job because we haven’t had any experience. It’s like Major League Baseball thought it had done a good job after two or three days; we now have all these players that have tested positive,” Wiseman says. “We’ll see how things unfold. It’s going to be a struggle no matter what happens.”
August 2, 2020
Erick Laming, a PhD candidate at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, speaks about allegations of excessive use of force by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in a CBC News story. "If you're an Indigenous person up north, you put a complaint in and it is legitimate and you really feel that it's legitimate, but it's the few officers up there doing the investigation. It's really difficult to have that trust," says Laming.
August 3, 2020
Political science professor Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, both comment on the targeting of senior clergymen in Togo with digital spyware — Deibert in Vice and Scott-Railton in The Guardian.
Department of History and Caribbean Studies program associate professor Melanie Newton writes about the legacy of the slave trade throughout the empires of European nations in an op-ed in Stabroek News, the national news outlet of Guyana.
Christopher Parsons, a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab, comments on potential shortcomings of the Canadian government’s COVID-19 contact tracing digital app due to inequities of access to the tool, in a CBC News story. “The worst affected by (the pandemic) are Black, Indigenous, people of colour, people who often have a lower socio-economic bracket. Who’s not going to be able to install the application? That same group ... that’s a problem,” says Parsons.
David Evans, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and senior curator in vertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, speaks about identifying cancer in dinosaurs for the first time in Gizmodo.
August 5, 2020
John Polanyi, a University Professor in the Department of Chemistry, makes the case for a ban on nuclear weapons in an op-ed in the Toronto Star (paywall).
August 6, 2020
Political science professor Wendy Wong co-authors an op-ed in the Toronto Star (paywall) about privacy concerns around the Canadian government’s COVID-19 contact tracing app.