On Leave
Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Cross-Appointments
Areas of Interest
- Indigenous planning
- Indigeneity and urbanism
- Indigenous knowledge systems
Biography
Heather Dorries is of Anishinaabe and settler ancestry and a member of Sagkeeng First Nation in Treaty 1. She is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed to the Department of Geography and Planning and Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the relationship between urban planning and settler colonialism and examines how Indigenous intellectual traditions—including Indigenous environmental knowledge, legal orders, and cultural production—can serve as the foundation for justice-oriented approaches to planning.
She is currently revising her book manuscript Planning the End of the World: Indigenist Planning Theory and the Art of Refusal, which demonstrates how Indigenous knowledge systems can inform resurgent forms of planning and urbanism. She is a co-editor of the collection Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Settler Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West (University of Manitoba Press, 2019).
Publications
- Beyond Safety: Refusing Colonial Violence Through Indigenous Feminist Planning. ( : 2020)
- Racial Capitalism and the Settler Colonial Relation: Notes from Winnipeg, Manitoba ( : 2019)
- Welcome to Winnipeg: Making Settler-Colonial Urban Space in ‘Canada’s Most Racist City’ (University of Manitoba Press : 2019)
- Settler City Limits.” In Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West (University of Manitoba Press : 2019)
- Planning Interface: Strengthening Planning’s Effectiveness in a Hyper-Polarized World/Responding to the Conservative Common Sense of Opposition to Planning and Development in England/The Limits to Negotiation and the Promise of Refusal/Planning Contexts i ( : 2018)
- Between Concept and Context: Reading Gilles Deleuze and Leanne Simpson in their In/commensurabilities ( : 2018)
- Planning as Property: Uncovering the Hidden Racial Logic of a Municipal Nuisance By-law ( : 2017)
- The Indian Act and urban Canada (Policy Options : 2017)