Josie Wittmer
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 榰rban 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.
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.
Wittmer, J. (2025) Waste as an economic and informational resource: the datafication of waste labour at India檚 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). 淚 salute them for their hard work and contribution: Inclusive urbanism and organizing women recyclers in Ahmedabad, India. Urban Geography, 44(9): 1911-1930.
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.
Wittmer, J. (2023). Dirty work in the clean city: An embodied urban political ecology of women informal recyclers work in the 榗lean city. Environment & Planning E: Nature & Space, 6(2): 1343-1365.
Wittmer, J. (2021). 淲e live and we do this work: Women waste pickers experiences of wellbeing in Ahmedabad, India. World Development, Vol 140: 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.
Wittmer, J. & Parizeau, K. (2016). Surviving neoliberal urbanism: Informal recyclers geographies of survival in Vancouver, BC. Applied Geography, 66: 92-99.
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檚 University). The urban politics of wastewater-based epidemiology: transforming the relationship between waste, health, and urban governance. Urban Studies Foundation (USF): . (2022-2023).