Geneviève Minville
The Centre for Refugee Studies is pleased to announce that Geneviève Minville has received the 2024 Anthony Richmond Scholarship. This scholarship recognizes promising graduate student research on the intersections of forced migration and environmental changes, such as climate change, flooding, drought, forest fires, and land or sanitary degradation.
Geneviève is a second year PhD student in Critical Human Geography at York University. She holds a Master’s degree in International Development and Globalization from the University of Ottawa and a Bachelor’s in Social Work from Université Laval. Her research interests include the intersection between climate change, disasters, and displacement. Her doctoral research is embedded in her interest in understanding how we can disrupt dualistic discourses of nature and society by uncovering our entanglement with ecologies around us and addressing the systemic and structural root causes of climate and environmental change as well as the consequences that humans (in) actions have on the well-being of humans and more-than-humans.
Specifically, Geneviève’s doctoral research studies the relationship between the environment and forced displacement and questions the environmental politics behind it. From a feminist political ecologist perspective, she intends to explore the discourse on climate migration beyond climate and environmental changes and disasters, emphasizing instead the structures co-creating and amplifying these changes and seeking to understand how the discourse on climate-induced migration can, in fact, often be synonymous with the narrative on development-induced migration. She intends to use sand mining in the Philippines as a starting point of analysis to explore how the mining of sand for development purposes can increase risks of impacts of climate change, including increased risks of landslides and floods in times of typhoons, which can then put people at higher risk of being forcibly displaced, and then being framed under one of the many labels of climate migration.
