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Combatting Poverty Homelessness through Expert Research
Dr. Naomi Nichols’s work drives social justice in the Peterborough community
Encampments in Peterborough’s Victoria Park
When Dr. Naomi Nichols ’97 researches social issues, she always tries to hire those with lived knowledge of these issues, including young people who have been involved in the drug trade, expelled from school or involved with child-welfare agencies, as well as those who’ve experienced homelessness. The Trent University biology and English graduate, now associate professor in Sociology and Canada research chair in CommunityPartnered Social Justice, says she values the expertise these participants bring to the table, which is different from, but just as important as, the expertise of other researchers, social services managers, child-welfare directors and municipal councillors.
“People with direct knowledge about a social issue have insights that are essential to the development of targeted, feasible, and effective strategies for alleviating the problems they face every day,” Professor Nichols says.
Prof. Nichols’s social-justice research interests and activities reflect her collaborations and partnerships with community-based organizations, youth-serving institutions, and young people. Her research collaborators also include graduate students, researcher practitioners, community advocates and institutional partners.
Driving social change in Peterborough and beyond
Since returning to Peterborough in 2020 to take up the Canada Research Chair position at Trent, Prof. Nichols has sought to drive social change in the local community, with research that often ends with several calls to action. She often serves as a social-justice issues spokesperson in the media; recently appearing on CBC Ontario Morning and in the Peterborough Examiner.
She’s passionate about her research into youth inequality, poverty, and homelessness, and exploring the social, institutional and policy systems that produce conditions of inequity in the public sphere. Currently, this work
includes an investigation of Canada’s move to embrace data-led governance on its effort to resolve an emerging youth homelessness crisis as well as the implementation of data-driven strategies in child welfare and the youth criminal justice systems.
Her current research builds on the research program she carried out as a professor at McGill University, where she studied the policy and institutional drivers of youth inequality and homelessness in schools, policing and the criminal-legal system, healthcare, and child welfare.
“This work impacts everyone,” she says. “Addressing inequality makes life better for everyone.”
Public policy, homelessness and poverty
An example of this is, when mapping the complex data systems, processes, policies and practices that govern young people’s trajectories into and out of homelessness, she uses her research to make these systems more transparent, userfriendly and equitable. She believes that by increasing the transparency of our public systems, people are better positioned to advocate for the things they need. In this way, she notes, we are also better positioned to assess whether our bureaucracies are effectively addressing the social problems they are meant to be solving. Prof. Nichols believes that there are myriad ways that public policies contribute to the problem of homelessness and and poverty.
For Dr. Nichols, it’s impossible to end Issues such as homelessness unless there are strong public policies to address housing affordability and income inequality. Working to end homelessness without addressing those underlying problems is simply virtue signalling, she says, and doesn’t address the root problems.
Prof. Naomi Nichols
Inspiring critical thinkers and social changemakers
Prof. Nichols maintains a similarly critical approach in the classroom. When teaching at Trent, she doesn’t reiterate what’s in readings, but engages with the content and invites students in the class to do so too—particularly in their written assignments.
“I love it when people bring their own experiential knowledge into conversation with the ideas we encounter in our readings or make connections to other courses they have taken, things they have read or observed,” she says. “I also choose readings that prompt all of us (myself included) to move outside our comfort zones, as we confront the ways we are variously implicated in entrenched and naturalized patterns of social inequality.”
Some classroom discussions have included frank and challenging conversations, such as how local planning policies may perpetuate institutionalized racism.
“If there are no hairdressers in Peterborough who have expertise in doing Black hair, then that could be a way the local community is communicating to Black students that they don’t belong,” she says.
Equity-driven education
When it comes to student development, she says she has an equity-driven approach. “Many of the graduate students I have supervised have lived experiences of the topics they investigate, meaning I actively support and mentor students who have experienced homelessness, poverty, racism, mental illness, gender-based violence, and other forms of systemic exclusion,” she says.
In 2021, Prof. Nichols founded the Research for Social Change Lab (RSCL) at Trent University. The lab aims to mobilize University resources for social change.
“With our community partners, we design and execute research projects to generate actionable knowledge and creative problem solving around issues such as homelessness, social exclusion and poverty,” she says.
Research underpinned by lived experience
One RSCL research project is exploring Peterborough’s response to housing and homelessness challenges. A team of lived-experience researchers is documenting the rules and procedures that dictate how housing and shelter resources are distributed in Peterborough.
“The goal is to read these rules and procedures in the context of our legislated obligation to realize the progressive right to housing,” Prof. Nichols says. “Are human rights being respected in Peterborough? Can we do better?”
Another RSCL research project, Data Justice for Youth, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, maps the complex data systems, processes, policies, and practices that govern young people’s trajectories into and
out of homelessness. The goal is to make these systems more transparent, user-friendly, and equitable.
Much of the RSCL research is conducted at Trent’s downtown campus at Traill College, which is more accessible to people who live or work downtown. Prof. Nichols often recruits participants through local social-service providers, including those delivering harm reduction supports to people who use drugs.
She’s thankful to work at Trent as she says the University’s social justice values align with her own. “Trent also has a culture that’s supportive of collective work and not a culture steeped in competition. Staff and faculty are genuinely invested in one another’s wellbeing and intellectual progress.”
In all, she says she finds joy in her research that aims to make the world a better place. “With research that’s justicefocused and evidence-led, we really can do better,” she says. “We can save lives.”
PHILANTHROPY IN ACTION
Award Winning Research and Activism
Trent sociology professor, Canada research chair, and institutional ethnographer, Dr. Naomi Nichols, won the Dorothy E. Smith Scholar-Activist award for her activism and scholarship examining institutions affecting the lives of youth and those experiencing homelessness. That work started during her Ph.D., where she worked with a local youth shelter to study the coordination of services for youth at-risk of homelessness and create programming that filled local service gaps. Later, Prof. Nichols led several participatory youth research teams who investigated how different institutional policies and processes shaped their lives. That research resulted in a book titled, Youth, School, and Community. “Young people spend most of their time in public institutions (e.g., in schools, using public transit systems). And so, as a team of youth, professors, and youth-workers, we looked at those institutions and the affordances and constraints they enabled in young lives, paying attention to how these shaped their developmental trajectories,” Prof Nichols said. “We flipped the gaze from focusing on youth as problematic or at-risk towards the inter-institutional practices that create conditions of inclusion and exclusion in young people’s lives.”
WE ARE EDUCATING
the political leaders of tomorrow ...
Trent’s inaugural Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership will help lead a first-of-its-kind collaboration focused on educating future leaders in government, politics and the public service.
