Assistant professor Gillian Russell awarded grant to support Ocean Futures project

Community Ocean Futures: activating data for alternative knowledges

Ocean Futures is a research creation project led by Dr. Gillian Russell and SFU School of Communication's Dr. Katherine Reilly, that explores and investigates how Speculative Design Methodologies can interact with Citizen Science projects to support the development of ocean futures literacies for British Columbians.

Through explicit linkages between culture, ecology, and environmental politics, the project aims to cultivate citizen and stakeholder awareness and action around the complex challenges and pressures confronting our oceans and inland waters. These challenges encompass a spectrum of interrelated issues including habitat and biodiversity loss, pollution from various sources such as litter, plastic, chemicals, excess nutrients, light, and underwater noise, as well as the proliferation of invasive species.

Through their research, Russell, Reilly and their team will design and deploy a series of community engaged speculative interventions across diverse regions like Galiano Island, Pender Island, Vancouver, and the Sunshine Coast. By combining scientific fact with creative speculation, the research aims to develop a series of community developed alternative ocean futures, in an effort to explore how we might think more creatively and radically about the environmental challenges facing marine ecosystems while empowering individuals and communities to become agents of change.