Dr. Jonathan Peyton

GEOG 3640 Social Geography of the Environment
GEOG/GPE 1700 Social Justice in the 21st Century: Global Political Economy and Environmental Change
GEOG 3770 Energy, Environment, Society
GEOG 4670 Winnipeg’s Urban Nature
GEOG 4670 Critical Canadian Resource Geographies

Jonathan Peyton teaches courses in environmental, historical and cultural geography. His research focuses primarily on the social, ecological and economic effects of megaprojects in the Canadian North – hydroelectric projects, extractive economies and large scale infrastructure developments. His book, Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development on Northwest British Columbia (UBC Press 2017), analyses five cases of imagined, abandoned or half-built development schemes – mines, dams, railways, roads and energy projects – to argue that even failed development dreams produce lasting material and discursive effects on the landscape and in the minds of stakeholders.

Current research focuses on the environmental history of hydrocarbon development in the Canadian offshore Arctic. Other projects aim to trace the dynamics of resource transitions on the prairies; the urban political ecology of Winnipeg’s trees, rivers, urban animals, and industrial spaces; and a larger consideration of the political ecology of failure in resource development.

Bernauer, W. and Peyton, J. In Press. “Energy Extraction, Resistance, and Political
Change in Inuit Nunangat” In The Inuit World ed. Pamela Stern (London: Routledge).

Peyton, J. and Dyce, M. 2021. “Encountering Oil Cultures in a Prairie Town, 1950-
Present” In The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region’s Environmental Histories
Eds. Kathleen Brosnan and Brian Frehner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).

Johnson, K., Ritts, M. and Peyton, J. “Canoes, Modernity and the Colonial Imagining of Progress” GeoHumanities 4.2 (2018): 481-503.

Peyton. J. Unbuilt Environments: Legacies of Post-War Development and Extractive Economies in Northwest BC (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017).