UVicSpace | Institutional Repository
UVicSpace is the University of Victoria’s open access scholarship and learning repository. It preserves and provides access to the digital scholarly works of UVic faculty, students, staff, and partners. Items in UVicSpace are organized into collections, each belonging to a community.
For more information about depositing items, see the Submission Guidelines.
Recent Submissions
Waste in the city: Challenges and opportunities for urban agglomerations
(InTech, 2018) Gutberlet, Jutta
Worldwide cities are rapidly expanding, creating visible environmental and social challenges. The generation of waste is one of the central concerns in urban agglomerations, particularly in the global South, where inadequacies, absences and weaknesses shape the local waste management system. Uneven geographic development has created obvious spaces of exclusion and neglect. In response, informal and organized waste pickers engage in selective waste collection and recycling, serving their community and the environment. These contributions are still mostly unrecognized and unaccounted for. This chapter begins with emphasizing the challenges of urban growth, consumption, poverty and waste. In the global South, every day millions of informal waste pickers reclaim recyclables from household waste to earn their living. In doing so they make an important contribution to reducing the carbon footprint of cities, recovering resources, improving environmental conditions and health creating jobs and income among the poor, particularly in low-income residential areas. This chapter discusses the organization of these initiatives into networks and examines the challenges and benefits of such practices that promote grassroots resilience and contribute to reducing both the adverse impacts of cities on climate and environmental change (UN sustainable development target # 11.6) as well as urban poverty (Goal # 8).
Citizen science
(Transcript, 2023) Jaeger-Erben, Melanie; Becker, Frank; Prüse, Baiba; Mendoza, Jimlea Nadezhda; Gutberlet, Jutta; Rodrigues, Eliana
The term citizen science originates from Anglo-American contexts and generally de-scribes the procedure of involving citizens who are not institutionally anchored in academia as active participants in a scientific research process. The use of the term “citizen” (etymologically derived from the Anglo-French word citisein “inhabitant of a city or community”, approx. 13th century), indicates a specific understanding of the persons involved, who, in the sense of the term citoyen coined in the French Enlightenment, actively and autonomously participate in the community and help to shape it. The tasks of citizens in this context range from collecting data to co-de-signing the entire research process, applying scientific quality standards, and producing scientifically usable results (Haklay et al. 2021; Pettibone et al. 2017). Citizen science as a designation for a specific form of knowledge production is mainly used in the European and North American context, where a differentiated research and funding landscape has evolved since the beginning of this century (Haklay et al. 2021). Similar approaches can be found in other parts of the world, but are framed under alternative terms such as community science (Conrad and Hilchey 2011) and community-based research (Amauchi et al. 2022). Citizen science brings together a multiplicity of approaches ranging from mass data collection events for citizens to forms of independent or self-determined research by non-academic groups or communities, calling the term itself into question (Eitzel et al. 2017).
Grassroots social innovation of waste pickers as critique of the existing social order
(Oxford, 2025) Gutberlet, Jutta; de Carvalho Vallin, Isabella
Grassroots initiatives in the waste sector can contribute to reducing poverty, increasing social inclusion, creating gender equity, and tackling a range of other social, environmental, and climate change objectives. In many parts of the world, organized waste pickers have developed leadership by delivering ecosocial contributions, helping cities deal with waste management, and addressing social valorization within the waste value chain. The activities of these grassroots agents entail an open critique of existing social and political orders, expressed in current mainstream regimes of waste and waste management. Novel practices emerge from marginal ‘niche’ contexts, in which waste pickers experiment with technological innovations, develop alternative governance forms, or obtain successful strategies for increasing income. This chapter discusses the ways in which waste pickers develop their own solutions to tackle the bottlenecks, challenges, and questions that they face in their everyday work life.
Advanced research computing at the University of Victoria
(University of Victoria, 2025) Albert, Jeff; Huber, Sarah; Birmingham, Jeff; Greasley, Jaimie
The Digital Research Alliance of Canada provides supercomputing and cloud computing resources to thousands of researchers across Canada. In this first video, Sarah Huber and Jeff Albert cover the basics of high-performance computing (HPC) as well as cloud computing and gives us a tour of the Arbutus cloud facility at the University of Victoria.
Particle physics at the University of Victoria
(University of Victoria, 2025) Russell, Heather
In this video, Professor Heather Russell talks about how her work on the ATLAS experiment is supported with advanced research computing.
The Digital Research Alliance of Canada supports thousands of researchers in Canadian higher education institutions by providing digital research infrastructure (DRI) tools and services. At the University of Victoria, many academics use these services for data storing, management and processing. In this video series, we cover what advanced research computing (ARC) is about and how it's being applied for scientific discovery.