UBC Journalism students Calyn Shaw and Claudia Goodine have been selected as TerreWeb scholars.
TerreWeb stands for Terrestrial Research on Ecosystems and World-wide Education and Broadcast. It is a cross-disciplinary program for graduate students, which focuses on global change and terrestrial ecosystems research that integrates science with the social sciences in order to create innovative communications strategies.
As scholars of TerreWeb, Calyn and Claudia will receive funding towards their research for this project.
Calyn, who won a Jack Webster Student Journalism Award in October, is a second-year graduate student at the UBC School of Journalism.
Rhetoric versus policy
Calyn’s TerreWeb proposal came out of his thesis topic, “Shale Gas: Special Interests and the Limits of Climate Action.” According to Calyn, “there is a significant gap in B.C. between the rhetoric of climate action and the policies pursued by the government.”
He earned his BA in Political Science in 2004 from the University of Victoria. Following his graduation he volunteered in Ethiopia conducting HIV/AIDS education workshops for youth in rural communities. He continued his work on HIV/AIDS in 2005/2006, spending six months in Ghana as an intern for CIDA. Calyn completed an MA in globalization and development politics in 2007 at the University of Warwick.
Upon his return to Canada, Calyn took a position with STAND, Canada’s leading Darfur advocacy organization. He moved back to Vancouver in 2009 to take a position with the ISIS Research Centre at the UBC Sauder School of Business.
As a Research Fellow, Calyn worked first on the Open Health Initiative investigating innovative financing for neglected disease drug development, and then as part of the Climate Intelligence Unit researching climate policy in British Columbia before beginning at the School of Journalism in 2010.
Legal and environmental rights
Claudia is a second-year Master of Journalism student at UBC.
Claudia’s TerreWeb proposal also came out of her thesis topic, “Canada’s Environmental Rights: A Zeitgeist in Waiting.” For this project, she will research how current forms of environmental policy in Canada would be affected by the legal recognition of environmental rights.
“While framing environmental issues around the concept of environmental rights seems like a useful tool, environmentalists, policy makers and the public have yet to adopt its use in Canada,” she said.
Claudia received her BA in Sociology from UBC in 2007.
In 2007, Claudia began working as a blog writer for Sawa World, which is a Vancouver based NGO that trains youth in impoverished areas to become community reporters. In 2009, Claudia was recognized for her blog writing at SAWA World with the Heroes for Humanity Award of Recognition, which was presented by the Art of Living Foundation.
Claudia has interned at Canada Wide Media Ltd. in Burnaby and Social Aid for the Elimination of Rape in Toronto. She has also worked at Ricepaper Magazine where she wrote book reviews and articles.
TerreWeb is funded by NSERC as a Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE).
The collaborative six-year project, which is led by Prof. Suzanne Simard from Forest Sciences at UBC, will include 10 UBC researchers and over 35 collaborators from around the world. The UBC School of Journalism’s Candis Callison and Dan McKinney are also affiliated faculty with TerreWeb. The project will also train 14 Masters, 13 PhDs and 5 Postdoctoral Fellows, as well as recruit undergraduates.
The aim of the TerreWeb project is “to develop collaborative, graduate educational programs that focus on global change, behavioral decision making and multimedia communications for informing stakeholders and the public using interactive assessment research and complex systems theory that contribute to the development of communication strategies for the dissemination of knowledge and to alter human behavior.”
