Assistant Professor

Program: Environment & Sustainability (Geography)

Email: jwittmer@mun.ca

Office: AS 387

 

Credentials

BA (hons) (2008) Carleton University
MA (2014) University of Guelph
PhD (2020) University of Guelph

 

Research Interests

I am a feminist, anti-colonial urban geographer working on urban environmental sustainability issues. My research broadly explores how the governance and production of various sustainability-oriented infrastructure projects (re)produce inequalities across multiple scales. I work on projects in Canada, Europe, and South Asia to examine how sewage, solid waste, and ‘urban greening’ initiatives are becoming sites for enclosure, data production, surveillance, and capital accumulation, while also remaining spaces of enduring labour precarity, social inequity, and activism.

 

Teaching

GEOG*1050: Geographies of Global Change
GEOG*2302: Issues in Economic Geography
GEOG*3050: Community and Regional Planning and Development
ENSU*3100: Environmental Planning and Management
ENSU*4200: Contemporary Issues in Environmental Studies

 

Representative scholarly contributions

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, 43 (6): 1070-1088. 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. (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. (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. & 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. (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. (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

 

Current research projects and grants

with co-PIs Kate Pendakis (SASS) and Dawn Pittman (WRSON): Access, Agency, and Inequality: Exploring Food Partnerships in Rural Newfoundland and Labrador. John and Judy Bragg Family Foundation Applied Research Fund (2025-2027). 

Sustainable futures of wastewater infrastructures in the making. SSE Start-up funds. (2024-2026). 

with Co-PIs: Mohammed Rafi Arefin (UBC) & Carolyn Prouse (Queen’s University). The urban politics of wastewater-based epidemiology: transforming the relationship between waste, health, and urban governance. Urban Studies Foundation (USF): Pandemics and Cities. (2022-2023).