Dr. Heather McLean
Associate Professor, Environmental Studies
Contact information
E-mail: hmclean@athabascau.ca
heather-mcleanCurrent courses
Dr. Heather McLean
Dr. Heather McLean
Associate Professor, Environmental Studies
Contact information
Email: hmclean@athabascau.ca
Phone:
Heather McLean (she/her) is a comedic performance artist whose work sits at the intersections of feminist, queer, decolonial, arts-based, and land-based research creation within environmental studies. Her scholarship and artistic practice explore urban inequalities, precarity, arts interventions, and the everyday spaces where agency, resistance, and mutual aid emerge. She is committed to challenging dominant narratives and involving community members, students, artists, and researchers in the co-production of knowledge.
From 2014 to 2019, Heather was an Urban Studies Fellow and later an Economic and Social Research Council Future Research Leader at the University of Glasgow. During this time, she collaborated with artists across the UK to examine how feminist arts collectives and artist-run centres supported marginalized communities amid funding cuts and increasingly competitive, market-driven cultural policies. Since, 2020, Heather has worked with artists across so-called Canada in creative storytelling projects that draw attention to climate disasters and rising costs of living.
Heather works with feminist and queer artists from around the world to co-create comedic interventions. Through her alter-ego performances, she offers critical and humorous responses to gentrification, market-oriented arts policy, fast fashion, and other strange and dispiriting aspects of settler-colonial life in late capitalism. Additionally, Heather is an active member of the Community of Economies Research Network’s global community of practice on arts-based research.
Research interests
Currently, her research explores the role of the arts in fostering mutual aid and community resilience in colonially named rural British Columbia and Alberta.
Heather’s creative practice is deeply entwined with her research. As a clown and comedian, she has collaborated with Dirty Plotz, a queer/feminist cabaret collective, and co-created drag king walking tours for the Workers’ Theatre, the People’s Bank of Govanhill, the Glasgow School of Art, the Edinburgh College of Art, the Western Canada Theatre Company (Kamloops) and the Gutterclown Cabaret (Vancouver).
In addition to her teaching, research, and performance practice, Heather is an active member of the Community Economies Research Network, a global collective of artists, scholars, and practitioners committed to fostering ways of living and thriving Together.
Educational credentials
- BA, Human Geography, University of British Columbia
- MsPL, Social policy and planning, University of Toronto
- PhD, Environmental Studies, York University
- Post-Doctoral Fellowship, University of Glasgow
Professional affiliations
- Community Economies Research Network
- Community Economies Institute
- Association of American Geographers