Signature Areas of Research: Communities and Sustainability
Exploring the interrelatedness of human communities and natural ecologies
Understanding the relationships among different peoples and the natural world and ensuring that they are maintained in a good way — a philosophy embodied in the Cree/Saulteaux concept of wahkohtowin — is crucial to overcoming urgent environmental, social, and political hurdles.
Signature Area Lead:
Dr. Vicki Squires (PhD)
vicki.squires@usask.ca
Signature Area Lead:
Dr. Shelley Kirychuk (PhD)
shelley.kirychuk@usask.ca
About the Signature Area
Embracing a spectrum of research approaches that are collaborative, relational and community-oriented, the University of Saskatchewan's (USask) Communities and Sustainability Signature Area of Research is working alongside communities as they develop meaningful solutions to pressing challenges. Recognizing that communities have distinct and important needs, priorities, models and structures, research activities within this area move beyond conventional scholarship models and towards shared and reciprocal sustainable community outcomes.
Research in the Communities and Sustainability Signature Area embraces a strengths-based model wherein both university researchers and community members play an important role. While work in this area engages a wide range of social and applied sciences, two-way learning and processes that position the voices, experiences and knowledge of all involved members remain central.
Notable Areas of Research
- Promoting social innovations through community connections and local capacity-building.
- Driving economic and social development in rural, remote, Northern and Indigenous communities.
- Supporting empowered decision-making within communities and organizations with a focus on governance, self-sufficiency and long-term sustainability.
- Helping communities and organizations identify and establish the policies, practices and resources needed to address the realities of a changing climate.
Upcoming Events
Tuesday, April 8, 3:00-5:00pm CST (SK/GMT-6)
FREE | REGISTRATION REQUIRED
In-Person: Prairie Room, Diefenbaker Building, 101 Diefenbaker Place, Saskatoon
Online: via Livestream link (will be emailed to registrants in advance of event)
The idea that computers might one day be able to outsmart humans has been around for as long as the computer age. Mostly, it seemed fanciful. Computers could crunch numbers, sure, but could they really think, reason, decide, and get smarter? With the advent of large-language models (LLMs) and tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, what was once science fiction is increasingly looking like here and now.
In this talk, Dr. Kirsten Wright, Managing Director of the University of Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI) will discuss the idea of artificial super-intelligence and explore how it could disrupt the labor/capital relationships that have long structured the way we organize ourselves. With this potential outcome in mind, she will set out a bold set of idea for building a resilient society anchored around strategic policy interventions that could help tip us into a society with more shared ownership (e.g., co-operatives) and a re-centering of place-based rural and urban economies.
About the speaker: Kirsten Wright is Managing Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI). Her work sits at the intersection of systems finance, governance, and innovation, with a focus on complex systems, economic resilience, and systemic transformation. Drawing on urban scaling theory, rent dynamics, she models how financialization shapes urban systems and explores pathways for resilient and equitable cities. Dr. Wright is a Visiting Scholar hosted by the USask Communities and Sustainability Signature Area.
Friday, April 11, 11:00am-12:30pm CST (SK/GMT-6)
FREE | REGISTRATION REQUIRED
In-Person: Mutli-purpose Room, First Floor, Station 20 West, 1120 20th Street West, Saskatoon
Cities generate immense wealth through their economic activity, yet much of this value is captured by financial actors, reshaping home ownership patterns, redistributing wealth, and destabilizing urban systems. Drawing on experience with a Waterloo start-up housing co-operative called Union Co-op and her research into models of urban dynamics, Dr. Kirsten Wright from the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI) will share her thoughts on how co-operatives can serve as a central solution to our pressing urban challenges by stabilizing tenure, preventing displacement, and preserving the productivity gains of urban agglomeration. By reinvesting urban rents into community-driven initiatives—such as affordable housing, renewable energy, and public infrastructure—co-operatives align urban growth with long-term equity and resilience.
This talk is hosted in partnership with Quint Development and supported by the University of Saskatchewan Communities and Sustainability Signature Area of Research.
About the speaker: Dr. Kirsten Wright is the managing director of the University of Waterloo Institute for Complexity & Innovation. She is a leading thinker on scaling social change set in the
context of environmental sustainability.
Signature Areas News
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