Jutta Gutberlet

Dr. Jutta Gutberlet, a 2019/2020 CFGS Faculty Fellow, is a Professor in the Department of Geography here at UVic and the Director of the community-based Research Laboratory (CBRL). Before coming to UVic, she taught at the University of Newcastle in Australia, co-coordinated an international research project between the University of Tübingen, Germany and the Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brazil, and worked on international development projects with the United Nations (FAO).

Her research is collaborative, action-oriented, community-based, and mostly qualitative in nature with a focus on development challenges, including: participatory resource management, food security, sustainable livelihoods, waste governance, and qualitative research methodology. Involving communities and local stakeholders in her work is fundamental to her. It creates momentum for the research process to become an emancipatory praxis which contributes to addressing everyday political, economic, and environmental realities. These processes allow communities to empower themselves to achieve greater social and environmental justice.

While she maintains an extensive peer-reviewed publication list, she also makes her research easily accessible to the general public through various communication forms including video, websites, pamphlets, booklets, and banners. As a researcher, she is committed to exposing the injustices and violences authorized by colonial ontologies and re-enacted by neocolonial structures and processes in everyday life. Her work is dedicated to co-producing knowledge to help reduce poverty and environmental degradation, and to recognize and learn from indigenous ontologies, as well as to support collective community engaged initiatives for social changes.

She is currently part of a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant on ‘Mapping Waste Governance’ that seeks to identify, examine, and document grassroots social innovations and challenges in waste governance in different geographic regions. The overall goal of the projects is to map the factors, processes, actors and links that entail good waste governance, to understand possible barriers and challenges in household waste management, as well as the factors that generate innovative forms of waste management resilient.