June 19, 2020 by
A&S News
Scholars from a range of disciplines across the Faculty of Arts & Science are sharing their expertise on pressing issues in the media — from conversations around various aspects of policing, to the notion of treating racism as a public health matter.
Here’s some of what they had to say this week.
June 12, 2020
- Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies PhD candidate Erick Laming comments on diversity of police forces in a CTV News story about calls to defund the police. Laming cites his research that shows when community members were asked whether seeing more visible minorities in policing would change the way they view police, most participants said it wouldn’t.
- Laming also pens an op-ed for CBC News examining oversight of police forces. “Wide-ranging investigative ability by an objective agency outside the police ranks would help enhance accountability and improve public confidence in the law-enforcement system,” Laming says.
- Matti Siemiatycki, an associate professor in the Department of Geography & Planning and interim director of the School of Cities, speaks about municipal infrastructure budgets in a Toronto Sun story about a proposed park adjacent to Toronto’s Union Station. Siemiatycki suggests that cost overruns in megaprojects can occur because politicians benefit personally from the prestige of a project, so they’ll downplay costs to get projects started.
June 14, 2020
- Erick Laming joins a discussion on CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup examining police forces in Indigenous communities in Canada, and how forces such as the Nishnawbe Aski Police Service in Ontario offers lessons in community policing that can help repair relationships with minority communities. "Police officers have to be culturally aware. They have to have emotional intelligence…because a lot of Indigenous people, they have been dealing with issues for centuries.
June 15, 2020
- Department of Sociology associate professor Jooyoung Lee comments on anti-Black racism among Asian communities in a CBC News story. Lee says he hopes the events of recent weeks will be a turning point in which immigrants of Asian descent will become more aware of the different ways white supremacy harms all people of colour and of the unique forms of racism that Indigenous and Black people face.
- Jihyun Kwon, a PhD candidate at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, comments on new details about a recent mass shooting in Nova Scotia in a Global News story. “[When there is a mass shooting, the collective response tends to be driven by] anxiety, shock, grief and anger rather than empirical evidence,” says Kwon. “You tend to see oversimplification and politicization of causes, motives and solutions.”
- Mark Manger, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, speaks about ways to protect Canada’s economy during a second wave of COVID-19 infections in The Hill Times (paywall). “The key is to target the public health measures to keep as much of the economy open, and to only shut down what is absolutely necessary,” Manger says.
June 16, 2020
- Melanie Newton, an associate professor in the Department of History, joins a discussion about a petition to rename Toronto’s Dundas Street on the Toronto Star’s This Matters (paywall) podcast. Newton provides historical context about how streets, towns and buildings were named and renamed, and examines how a history of colonization and its monuments can be felt in present day.
June 17, 2020
- Lisa Strug, an associate professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences, the director of CANSSI Ontario and a senior scientist at the Genetics and Genome Biology program at SickKids Research Institute, discusses the possible genetic factors that reduce the severity of COVID-19 among certain people infected by the coronavirus. “Genetics likely contribute to both a person's symptoms of disease and their susceptibility,” says Strug in a USA Today story. “When some entire families are wiped out by the virus, while others escape without serious harm, it is an indication that genetics is at play.”
- Incoming Department of Economics assistant professor Michael Stepner comments in the New York Times (paywall) on how the decline in spending by the most wealthy people during the COVID-19 pandemic impacts the workers who depend on it. “One of the things this crisis has made salient is how interdependent our health was,” says Stepner. “We’re seeing the mirror of that on the economic side.”
- Professor Ito Peng of the Department of Sociology and the Asian Institute at the Munk School comments on the notion of treating racism as a public health issue in a Global News story. “The challenge of framing this issue as a public health issue is that it reduces everything down to health, and in some ways, it masks the real problem,” Peng says. “It doesn’t get to the heart of the problem because the heart of the problem is a much more complex set of inequalities.”
June 18, 2020
- Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology assistant professor Chelsea Rochman discusses her team’s latest research on the prevalence of microplastics and clothing fibres in Canada’s Arctic waters in the Globe and Mail (paywall). “I think we know enough to be concerned but we still have a lot of questions,” says Rochman. “Particularly, how does it impact the ecosystem and how does it impact the communities that rely on [that ecosystem] so heavily?”
- Lynette Ong, a professor in the Department of Political Science and the Asian Institute at the Munk School, comments in the Globe and Mail (paywall) on the decision by China to lay charges against two detained Canadians. Of the charges, Ong says they are “a desperate act by Beijing to shore up its power in the post-pandemic world amid the accusation of a cover-up earlier. But it’s a miscalculation. I think it will backfire.”
- Ecology & Evolutionary Biology associate professor Megan Frederickson speaks to CNN about the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the ability of female researchers to maintain their scholarly output. "As academics we live in a publish-or-perish world. It could be harmful for our career progressions,” Frederickson says.