City Institute director receives major award for scholarly distinction

Linda Peake
Linda Peake
Professor Linda Peake, director of the City Institute and a member of the Urban Studies program and the graduate programs in Geography, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies and Development Studies, is the 2020 winner of the Canadian Association of Geographers Award (CAG) for Scholarly Distinction.
Linda Peake
Linda Peake

Peake’s award was announced during the CAG’s annual general meeting, which was held online on May 26.

“Linda Peake has been at the forefront of research in feminist geography for three decades. She has published extensively on women, work and family relations in the Anglo-Caribbean, and has maintained a long collaborative relationship for research, training and advocacy with the Red Thread grassroots women’s organization in Guyana. This work has also informed her numerous important contributions on processes of geographic knowledge production, and especially the development of feminist, collaborative and transnational research methods,” stated her nomination.

In their letter to CAG, Peake’s nominators praised her theoretical work on the intersection of race and gender, which they state has been influential in human geography and beyond. Their nomination letter also highlighted how Peake’s contributions to urban theory have developed thinking about the spatiality of inequality, poverty, racism, violence and subject formation.

“Over the last few years, Dr. Peake has led a collective reflection on issues of wellness and mental health in the academy, foregrounding critical issues that have never been fully discussed in our field,” continued the award nomination. Peake is currently co-leading an American Association of Geographers task force on the issue of wellness and mental health, and she is mobilizing discussions within the Canadian academy.

Her nominators also cite her leadership role in the development of feminist thinking in geography, stating that Peake has contributed important analyses and histories of the emergence of critical and radical approaches in the discipline.

To learn more about Peake’s award-winning scholarship, see her profile at https://lpeake.info.yorku.ca/.