Potential Project Topics by Supervisor for 2024/25

Topic Description 501 502

Monumental Waste/Waste as Monument

Throughout Ontario (as well as Canada and the world), old dumps and landfills have been transformed into recreational parks and other spaces that invite residents and visitors to use as safe and enjoyable spaces. This student-led project will use one or more of these sites as a case study to explore the discourses used to render waste sites safe and amenable to human consumption.

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‘Because You’re Worth It’: Peddling Consumption as ‘Self-Care’

This project will explore the recent marketization of ‘self-care’ consumerism. From yoga mats to smart watches, the project will analyze discourses that associate consuming with positive mental health.

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Queering Waste

Scholars, social activists, and neoliberal capitalism have queered humans, non-humans, objects, processes, spaces and times. What does it mean to queer waste? This student-led project would explore ‘queering waste’ as a concept, focusing on queer as non-normative structures and processes.

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Cruise ship waste

Cruise ships might be thought of as massive mobile waste-making ‘machines’. Many cruise ships pay the countries they dock in to offload their waste. These (often) small island countries are not well-equipped to deal with the volumes and toxicity of the waste, and struggle to manage in ways that do not compromise local communities and the environment. This study would use secondary data to explore this environmental and social justice issue

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Contact: hirdm@queensu.ca     

 

Topic 501 502
Exploring the feasibility of different climate change mitigation pathways

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Comparing the effectiveness of different climate change mitigation policies

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Evaluating the impact of the 2015 Paris Agreement

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Creating earth system model emulators using machine learning

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Compiling and analyzing global datasets for the purpose of evaluating earth system models

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Contact:christian.seiler@queensu.ca     

Topic Description Requirement 501 502
Pipeline Oil Pollution Investigating the effects of pipeline oil spills in British Columbia's rivers on early life stages of chinook salmon. Student must be in a BSc program with a basic knowledge of experimental design and statistics, with a keen interest in fish biology and ecotoxicology. ü ü
Contact: , diane.orihel@queensu.ca