Carolyn Prouse

Associate Professor & Queen’s National Scholar
Dept. of Geography & Planning
Queen’s University, Kingston

  • SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018) in Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto
  • PhD (2017) in Geography at the University of British Columbia
  • MA (2011) in Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University
  • BA/BPHE (2008) at Queen’s University

I currently live in Kingston/Katarokwi with my partner, Mark, and our dog, Lucy. Outside of work I can often be found fumbling around on the fiddle, reading novels, or looking for local pick-up soccer games.

Research

I am an anticolonial urbanist, feminist economic geographer, and white settler living on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory. My research is focused on how diverse urban communities are marginalized by economic development and social reproductive initiatives, and how people and markets are transformed through grass-roots space-making practices. I draw together work in feminist geographies, critical race theory, political economy, urban political ecology, and postcolonial/decolonial theory to help understand these processes. I ask questions such as:

  • How do low-income, racialized communities grapple with state-led upgrading efforts in Brazilian favelas?
  • How do communities build their own “public” infrastructure (such as park areas) in the shadow of state-led projects?
  • How are zoonotic biosurveillance programs re-configuring the labour of people in Southern cities and with what implications for their safety and justice?
  • How does non-valued work – such as breastfeeding – become distributed through urban infrastructures of infant feeding?

My work takes me to North America, South America, and Africa.

Select Publications

*for a full list of publications please see CV below

Arefin, M.R & Prouse, C. Urban Political Ecologies of Sewage Surveillance: Creating vital and valuable public health data from wastewater. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Prouse, C. (2023) Affective registers of favela infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro. Social and Cultural Geography 24(7): 1145-1164.

Prouse, C. (Fall 2022). What lies beneath: Can we control the data gleaned from wastewater surveillance? The Skeleton Press: Issue 11. Access here.

Prouse, C. (2021) Social reproductive metabolisms of human milk banking in Brazil. Geoforum. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.024

Prouse, C. (2021) Mining liquid gold: The lively, contested terrain of human milk valuations. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. DOI: 10.1177/0308518X21993817

Prouse, C. (2021). Articulating corruption of infrastructural upgrading projects in Brazil. Political Geography (84). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102305

Prouse, C. (2019). Of mosquitoes and mega events: Urban political ecologies of the more-than-human city. In S Darnell & R Millington (Eds.) Sport, Development and Environmental Sustainability. Routledge.

Prouse, C. (2018) Autoconstruction 2.0: Social media contestations of racialized violence in Complexo do Alemão. Antipode 50(3): 621-640.

Webber, S. & Prouse, C. (2018). The new ‘gold standard’: The rise of randomized control trials and experimental development. Economic Geography 94(2): 166-187.

*Curriculum Vitae available here: PDF

Current Projects

Precarious Intimacies of Biosurveillance

This research, funded by the Urban Studies Foundation and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, teases out the geographies of biosurveillance efforts in cities across the globe. Our focus is on how new data reservoirs of wastewater and blood are being consolidated by biotech and pharmaceutical companies to monitor the emergence and prevalence of infectious disease, and what effect this might have on populations being monitored. Check out our website.
Co-Investigator:
Dr. Rafi Arefin (University of British Columbia)

Slum Upgrading in the Global South

This work, based on my doctoral research, focuses on how low-income communities in the Global South are being “integrated” through infrastructural projects meant to securitize the city for urban capital accumulation. I ask how colonial and racialized violence shape these projects, and how residents grapple with them and work towards making life in their communities. I have also begun drawing on urban political ecology literature to understand the nature-culture hybridities of upgrading efforts and mega project developments.

Social Reproductive Geographies of Human Milk Markets

Another SSHRC-funded project investigates emerging economies and infrastructures of human milk exchange. Drawing on feminist and decolonial geographies I theorize how countries in both the Global North and Global South have developed donor milk banking networks as a form of “anti-colonial” social reproduction that (re)produces gendered and racialized norms of “good motherhood”; and how milk is being valued – and profited from – at diverse scales across the globe.

Biosecurity and Vaccine Equity

COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of international property law to vaccine equity and the power of high-income countries to shape these legal geographies. Our project investigates the conjunctures through which intellectual property rights in pharmaceuticals are being made and re-made with a specific focus on Brazil, India, Thailand, and South Africa.

Co-Investigators:
Dr. Juliane Collard (University of Bern)
Dr. Paige Patchin (University College London)

Teaching & Supervision

Teaching

I teach courses in urban studies, urban political ecology, social and feminist geography, and anti-colonial theory.

My pedagogy is shaped by feminist and decolonial commitments. I pay close attention to how knowledge is created and who is recognized for creating it. My syllabi centre scholars, activists, and media that are often marginalized in disciplinary thought. I also invite guests to communicate material that I cannot teach with an authoritative voice – such as Indigenous or black experiences and epistemologies.

I received the Department of Geography and Planning’s Julian Szeicz Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018/19 and 2021/22.

Graduate Supervision

I work with MA and a PhD students in the areas of global/decolonial urbanism, social reproduction, and critical race feminist geographies. Current students’ projects include Black diaspora in Canadian cities, digital food communities, the history of animals in cities, and reproductive rights in Argentina (see geels.ca for profiles)

Prospective students may have a general research project in mind or may work more directly in the area of my current SSHRC-funded projects. Students with research interests in urban political ecology, infrastructure, sport mega events, and slum-upgrading are also encouraged to contact me.

Contact: carolyn.prouse [@] queensu.ca

GEELs Lab

I am co-founder and co-principal investigator of the Global Economies and Everyday Lives (GEELs) Lab with Prof. Beverley Mullings and Asst. Prof. Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin. We and our students are a creative and critical community of scholars in Geography and Planning at Queen’s University interested in issues related to social reproduction, racial capitalism, cities, diaspora, and social transformation in spaces of the Global South. Our respective work centres diasporic caring relationships; creative cultural productions and popular culture; community-centred food and infant-feeding practices; youth employment and precarity; political ecological disaster and renewable energy; and new forms of work and labour. Please visit the GEELs website for more about what we do.

Courses

GPHY 229: Place, Space, Culture, and Social Life

This course includes six modules: Place and Space; Carceral and Abolition Geographies; Nature and Embodiment; Geographical Imaginaries; Land(scape); and Borders. Our geographical interrogations will take us from favela tours in Rio de Janeiro to harm reduction organizing in our own backyard. We will follow Wonder Woman to Egypt and witness the Mi’kmaq battling zombies on Turtle Island. Our course materials will include both academic literature and cultural artefacts like films, music videos, and novels that we encounter in our daily lives.

GPHY 369: Urban Natures

In this course we use tools of urban political ecology to look at how interlocking systems of power produce urban environments. Our guiding approaches include feminist, political economic, Indigenous, and decolonial systems of thought – we ask how racialization, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and other axes of power shape urban ecological worlds but also, crucially, learn from the work of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities across the world who are transforming harmful environments. Modules include food sovereignty, water and sanitation, health, waste, and ‘natural’ disasters.

GPHY 401: Special Topics (Pandemic Urbanism)

This course is inspired by the COVID-19 global pandemic and its intimate relationship with urbanization processes. In this class we take an urban political ecology perspective to understand how urbanization has transformed human-animal relations, contributing to disease outbreaks; and how the city has been a key site of disease proliferation, negotiation, and containment. Our political ecological approach stresses the power regimes within which bacteria and viruses proliferate and take shape, from processes of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, to new forms of social reproduction and care.

GPHY 860: Anticolonial Urbanism

This graduate seminar is inspired by the “southern” turn in urban theory, seeking to de-centre models of the city derived from very particular – and privileged – experiences in the Euro-Atlantic world. The syllabus includes readings in contemporary postcolonial, decolonial, feminist, queer, and critical race theory. We examine and discuss these perspectives with an eye to understanding what each contributes to urban processes across the North and South. Specific topics include anticolonial science, surveillance, political citizenship, bioeconomies, and diaspora.

Contact hours: 3 seminar hours

Contact

Carolyn Prouse
Associate Professor
Office: Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room D304
Tel: 613-533-6000 ext. 78592
Email: carolyn.prouse [at] queensu.ca

Department of
Geography & Planning

Queen’s University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada