Geographer / University of Victoria, Canada
Jutta Gutberlet is a Full Professor in Geography at the University of Victoria (UVic) in British Colombia, Canada. She received her PhD in Geography from the University of Tübingen, in Germany. Before coming to Canada, she had an appointment at the University of Newcastle in Australia and she worked for two years for the United Nations (FAO). She is the founder of the Community-based Research Laboratory (CBRL) at the University of Victoria, a research hub for academics and practitioners, focused on participatory community-engaged research and outreach.
She currently teaches urban development in the global south, qualitative research methodology and different regional studies and doctoral courses. Her research takes an interdisciplinary social sciences approach, investigating everyday livelihoods and development issues related to waste and discard with a particular focus on low and middle income countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia. She brings an intersectional perspective and a participatory action-oriented method to research that is geared towards governance and organization that promotes sustainable livelihoods, resilient community building and a healthy global environment.
She involves communities and local stakeholders (e.g., waste picker organizations, social movements and practitioners) in her research which allows also disenfranchised communities and individuals to use their agency to achieve greater social and environmental justice and empowerment, and contribute to waste related debates.
She has received several awards for her work, including the Excellence 2015 Outstanding Community Service Award, in 2015, the Provost’s Community Engaged Scholar award in 2018 and the Faculty of Social Sciences Award for Recognition of Outstanding Community Outreach, in 2021. Recently, she was a research fellow at the Centre for Global Studies (CFGS), UVIC (2019/2020) and at the Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique Latine (IHEAL), Sorbonne University, Paris (2018) and numeral times at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), in Brazil. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, monographs and book chapters.