Activist, researcher, educator and author
Jen Gobby is an activist-scholar and educator based on unceded Abenaki territory in rural Quebec. She is the founder of the Mud Girls Natural Building Collective and co-Director of Research for the Front Lines. In 2019, she completed her Ph.D at McGill University as part of the Economics for the Anthropocene partnership and is now an Affiliate Assistant Professor at Concordia University in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment. She teaches courses on environment and climate change at Bishop’s University and at McGill’s Bieler School of Environment. She is also a public educator, regularly giving presentations and workshops on a variety of topics including climate justice, theories of transformative change, and building stronger social movements through better allyship, collaborations and solidarity.
Her research is focused on climate policy, climate justice, social transformation and Indigenous – settler relations in social movements in Canada. She is the author of the book More Powerful Together: Conversations with Climate Activists and Indigenous Land Defenders.
She is now the director of Research for the Front Lines, a new initiative that connects grassroots communities and organisers on the front lines of the fight for environmental and climate justice with researchers who have skills and time to offer.
She is currently working on a project with Indigenous Climate Action to critique Canadian federal climate policy from the perspective of Indigenous rights and to develop Indigenous-led climate policy. They recently produced the report Decolonizing Climate Policy in Canada.
Jen is also collaborating with community organisers in Montreal and Concordia’s Centre for Social Transformation on a project to document our collective learning during the COVID pandemic about seizing crises to build more just, more equitable and sustainable economic, political, and social systems.
Jen believes that research, when done well, can meaningfully contribute to resisting extractive, colonial capitalism and [re]building just, flourishing alternatives. She is busy learning with others, how to do this.
Jen Gobby 