People

Our team

Simone Chen. Originally from Los Angeles, Simone has been living in Montreal since 2015, where she completed a BA in Environment and Development at McGill University. She seeks to cultivate participatory, ecological urban agriculture as a way to help combat food insecurity in economically vulnerable communities. She currently works in Parc-Extension with a cooperative food solidarity NPO, coordinating a neighborhood fruit gleaning project. She believes that a holistic approach to building resilient local food systems necessitates the inclusion of community-based research and grassroots action for tenants’ rights and just access to land.

Emanuel Guay is a doctoral student in sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His doctoral project focuses on access to housing for low-income households in Parc-Extension. He has developed an expertise in housing-related community organization through his volunteer involvement in Brick by Brick and the Parc-Extension Action Committee (CAPE) as well as his training as a researcher, under the supervision of Naomi Nichols, in the organization Dans la rue (2018-2019). He is a member of the Community-Based Action Research network of Parc-Extension (CBAR) and collaborated for three years (2017-2019) with the Social Equity and Diversity Education Office at McGill University (SEDE) as an associate researcher.

Alessandra Renzi believes in building strong community networks through rigorous research, ethical collaborations that uphold disadvantaged communities, and respect for local knowledges and needs. As a media “artivist” and researcher she has studied and organized for migrant rights, media democracy, work security, the right to housing and the de-criminalization of social movements in Italy, Germany, Canada, USA and Indonesia. She is Associate Professor of Critical Media Production in the Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, where her research-creation explores the intersection of media, art and civic engagement.

Aaron Vansintjan‘s research focuses on how community wealth, especially food culture and food habits, become transformed, eroded, and commodified through the gentrification process through a study of neighborhoods in Montreal and Hanoi. He is co-editor of Uneven Earth, a website on environmental politics, and his work also focuses on issues such as radical urban democratic movements, equitable degrowth, and urban political ecology.

Tamara Vukov is a researcher, writer and filmmaker active over the years in community-based organizing and media in Montréal. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal. She has been a resident of the neighbourhoods adjacent to the new Campus MIL for over 30 years, and has had direct experience with eviction-related issues in this time (including a personal reversed eviction attempt along with too many evictions of friends and community in the last 10+ years).

Sepideh Shahamati is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University. Her research focuses on humanistic approaches in urban planning theory and practice. She is interested in people’s interaction with the built environment and the tangible and intangible dimensions of cultural heritage. In her current research, she explores ways of integrating intangible assets of cities in planning and policy-making by investigating different mapping methods.

Razan AlSalah works with projection mapping as a community media tool. With her fellow PEAMPs, she sets up a projector to overlay architecture with community action demands, images and narratives, making visible and mapping onto public space the language, faces and stories of people living and working in this place. She also enjoys how communities are able to organize around these projection actions, bringing people and images together to occupy public space in different fun and urgent ways. Razan is an artist and teacher in media production at the Communication Studies department at Concordia University.

Yannick Baumann is a PhD student at Université de Montréal’s Geography Department in co-direction with the Geomedia Lab at Concordia University. Drawing on participative and activist methodologies, his PhD research focuses on the potential of (digital) data and (digital) tools to foster community relations and to support housing struggles. His primary interests are housing justice, financialization of housing, data activism, and alternative cartographies. Outside academia, Yannick likes to spend time in protests and code (even though he’s still a novice). He also has two cats named Achille and Chlore.

Our accomplices, allies, collaborators…

Marcos Ancelovici (Mapping of evictions and community power in Parc-Extension/Cartographie des évictions et des mobilisations communautaires à Parc-Extension)

Montse Emperador Badimon (Mapping of evictions and community power in Parc-Extension/Cartographie des évictions et des mobilisations communautaires à Parc-Extension)

Élise Ross-Nadie (Web, design and communication magic)

Anne-Marie Trépanier (Communication magic)

Vijay Kolinjivadi (Former member)

Shazma Abdulla (Former member)

Our advisory board

Sara Andrade (Parc-Extension resident, Aboriginal law lawyer)

Amy Darwish (Parc-Extension resident, community organizer, Comité d’action de Parc-Extension)

Tatiana Gomez (Parc-Extension resident, immigration lawyer)

Sophie Le-Phat Ho (Brique par Brique)

Alex Megelas (Community-Based Action Research Network in Parc-Extension)

Naomi Nichols (Assistant Professor, Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University)

Kira Page (Conflict resolution, CoCo)

Norma Rantisi (Professor, Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University)