ICER News

Feb.15
11:30 -12:30 pm
Arts 368

Passionate Interests and Community Decision Making: Increasing Food Security in Kamloops, BC

Kamloops, BC is renowned for its community investment in food security – home to Canada’s oldest grassroots food policy council, it also has well-established municipal support for food security programs. Since its formation in 1995, the Kamloops Food Policy Council (KFPC) has collectively made decisions about the initiatives it values, including informal conversations over potlucks, strategic planning and participation in formal community consultation processes. These ongoing processes of deliberation reflect what Bruno Latour describes as the “passionate interests” of actors: intense attachments between members assembled around matters of concern that result in a reconceptualization of “value” as impromptu, mobile, and intransitive. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted with the KFPC since 2017, I situate the network’s decision-making and valuation practices in the broader historical context of agricultural disinvestment in the Kamloops region. As long-term economic and regulatory trends have eroded production and diversity in the sector, the priorities and interests of KFPC have grown more expansive despite the constraints that limit the possibilities of their work. I argue that, as members of the Kamloops food system network assemble around their urgent matters of concern, other “things” function as decision makers alongside them: past and current agricultural infrastructure, consultative planning documents, and indeed, the land itself. Though the network often takes up initiatives that fundamentally don’t compute (in terms of dollars or calories), they erode reliance on dispassionate calculation and render alternative processes of valuation transparent.

Lindsay Harris is a community-based researcher living, eating and gardening with her daughter and partner in Kamloops, BC. Her research interests are focused on grassroots decision-making, food security and rural development in the BC Interior.

Tuesday October 16
12:30 – 1:30 pm, Arts 368

Everyone is welcome to attend!

Engaging communities in rural health workforce retention research

Australia and Canada face significant challenges in achieving adequately staffed rural health services. Factors affecting retention of rural health professionals involve complex interactions of organisational, professional and psychosocial/personal factors and research has shown psychosocial/personal factors to be a major determinant of retention. Building on these findings, I have developed a ‘whole-of-person’(WoP) retention framework that is being trialled in partnership with two public-health services in rural Australia. The WoP framework lends itself to context specific retention interventions. This presentation focuses on community engagement, place-based issues and strategies being trialled to improve the social connection of newly-arrived
non-locals. The challenges and opportunities for rural communities to take an active role in addressing workforce shortages will be discussed. This presentation has broad relevance for rural
communities, government agencies, and health authorities interested in exploring innovative approaches to address health workforce shortages in rural communities.

Dr. Cath Cosgrave is a researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Cosgrave lives and works in rural Australia. Her research specialises in recruitment and retention of
nursing and allied health professionals. She researches in partnership with health and community services recently piloting whole-of-person approaches to recruitment and retention and brokering community-based solutions for meeting the needs of health professionals
living in rural towns. She is committed to improving the quality of rural health services and the level of health equity and social inclusion for people from vulnerable population groups, particularly those living with mental illness.