Community work: Dr. Katie MacDonald

I am really excited about how AU is dedicated to the accessibility of education and learning. I am passionate about access to education having done a lot of community work with programs like Humanities 101 in Edmonton and am really excited to be at an institution that is dedicated to making learning more accessible.

I have two main areas of research, both of which look at how people understand inequity and efforts to address it. Each of these projects is through an intersectional feminist lens. The first area is global learning. I am currently developing a project that will examine experiences of sexual violence while on global learning opportunities. This project will include both a policy analysis, as well as a qualitative inquiry into lived experience. The second project looks at affordable housing where I examine the experiences of those who work on the frontlines of affordable housing. I am also a co-investigator on an exciting research project about affordable housing called Community Housing Canada.

Both projects came out of my experiences. When I was an undergraduate student, I volunteered in Ecuador and from there spent many years thinking about the dynamics and politics of global education. I wrote my MA about international development voluntourism in Ecuador and then my MEd and PhD were focused on experiences in Nicaragua. I was supposed to travel again to Nicaragua with a community service learning course two years ago, but due to conflict, we weren’t able to go. You can read more about that experience here.

Over the past four years, I have been working in the affordable housing sector in policy and research. There is a lot of attention on affordable housing right now with the National Housing Strategy signaling new federal investment, and more recently COVID-19 has drawn attention to how precariously housed many people are across Canada. As the affordable housing sector shifts, I am interested in what these shifts mean for those working on the frontlines. There is a lot of research in Canada on homelessness and homelessness prevention (the Homeless Hub is an amazing resource), but not as much on the context of affordable housing. I am really interested in thinking about affordable housing policies and practices, how they are conceptualized and implemented, and what the impacts are on both those accessing housing and those working in the sector.

I have conducted research in Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Canada. I have also been a co-investigator on a project that included research in Rwanda, Honduras, Ghana, and Dominican Republic.

It is central to my work that any research I do is connected to community. I seek to make my research accessible and useful for those who are impacted by it. Many of my projects wouldn’t exist without my community-based work—those connections and experiences led me to asking important questions, and working with folks on the ground who know way more than I do. I am a lifelong learner and so most of my research emerges out of a curiosity about things around me.

Poverty is relational. Poverty prevention must be hand-in-hand with wealth prevention. We know that there are policies and changes that we can make that impact people’s wellbeing—affordable housing, childcare, food, etc. are all key parts of helping people to live well in the system as it is, but there is no repair to the system that will prevent all poverty. This is one of the reasons that my research interests, which seem disconnected, are connected. I want to explore how people understand inequity, and how we may be able to move towards a relational understanding that will have real impacts on people’s lives now, as well as in the future.

COVID-19 has been a revealing and exasperation of inequities that have already been normalized; Sonya Renee Taylor has articulated this in important and powerful ways. I am working on a special issue of the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning right now with a colleague that asks how three moments of rupture in the past year—the Black Lives Matter movement and increased mainstream attention to racial inequity; COVID-19 and new imaginings of travel, mobility, and safety; increasingly necessary mutual aid in a pandemic—can create a possible way forward for international service learning that centres relationality and justice.

Affordable housing is central to safety in COVID-19. So many of the measures that are being implemented for public health assume that people have safe, secure and affordable housing. Where do you wash your hands regularly if you are houseless? If libraries close, where do you access the internet to apply for affordable housing? There are so many instances of the ways in which measures prioritize people who have housing and resources. We have seen this in the instances of curfews, what closes and what remains open, the increases in domestic violence cases, and the staggering increase of need for affordable housing in the past year.