Dr. Josie Wittmer

Assistant Professor

Geography | Environment and Sustainability

Memorial University – Grenfell Campus

jwittmer@mun.ca

 

I received my PhD from the University of Guelph in the collaborative program in Geography and International Development Studies. I am a feminist, anti-colonial urbanist working on issues of urban sustainability, precarious work, and environmental health with a focus on urban infrastructure transformations, digital sustainability solutions, and the governance of solid waste and wastewater in Canada and South Asia.

I do ethnographic and community-engaged work and use mixed qualitative methods to explore various sustainability-oriented initiatives to understand the variegated everyday impacts that emerge in the transformation of urban spaces, service delivery, and infrastructures. My research has been supported by funding from the Urban Studies Foundation, SSHRC, the Society of Woman Geographers, and the University of Lausanne. I am a member of the Great Northern Peninsula Research Collective (GNP-RC) in Newfoundland.

 

Education

  • PhD Geography and International Development Studies, University of Guelph (2020)
  • MA Geography, University of Guelph (2014)
  • BA (hons) Environmental Studies, Carleton University (2008)

 

Research Interests

  • Community engaged research
  • Critical pedagogy
  • Critical data studies/ digital geographies
  • Environmental governance + justice
  • Feminist geography/methodologies
  • Infrastructure
  • Labour
  • Mental health in the academy
  • Political ecology
  • Waste and discard studies

 

Teaching at Grenfell

GEOG*1050 – Geographies of Global Change

GEOG*3350 – Community and Regional Planning and Development

GEOG*2302 – Economic Geography

ENSU*3100 – Environmental Planning and Management

 

Selected Publications

Wittmer, J. (2025). Waste as an economic and informational resource: the datafication of waste labour at India’s informational periphery. In (Eds.) Datta, A. & Hoefsloot, F. Informational peripheries: Rethinking the urban in a digital age. UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088894

Wittmer, J., Prouse, C., & Arefin, M. R. (2025). Digitalizing sewage: The politics of producing, sharing, and operationalizing data from wastewater-based surveillance. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 0 (0): Online First.  https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241313454

Arefin, M.R., Prouse, C., Wittmer, J. et al. (2025). Making waves: A justice-centered framework for wastewater-based public health surveillance. Water Research, 268 (B): 122747. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2024.122747

Wittmer, J. (2023). “I salute them for their hard work and contribution”: Inclusive urbanism and organizing women recyclers in Ahmedabad, India. Urban Geography, 44(9): 1911-1930. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2023.2192560

Wittmer, J. (2023). Dirty work in the clean city: An embodied urban political ecology of women informal recyclers’ work in the ‘clean city’. Environment & Planning E: Nature & Space, 6(2): 1343-1365. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221102374

Wittmer, J. & Qureshi, M. (2023). Navigating the emotion-embodiment-language nexus in international research: Stories from a foreign researcher and local interpreter. Emotion, Space and Society, 49: 100990. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2023.100990

Wittmer, J. (2021). “We live and we do this work:” Women waste pickers’ experiences of wellbeing in Ahmedabad, India. World Development, Vol 140: 105253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105253

Wittmer, J. & Parizeau, K. (2018). Informal recyclers’ health inequities in Vancouver, BC. New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, 28(2): 321-343.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1048291118777845

Wittmer, J. & Parizeau, K. (2016). Surviving neoliberal urbanism: Informal recyclers’ geographies of survival in Vancouver, BC. Applied Geography, 66: 92-99.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2015.10.006