dr. JC (Jennifer) Veilleux

Dr. Veilleux is a geographer focused on water sovereignty and security in a rapidly changing intersectional climate regime. She combines qualitative and quantitative methods to collect global data, analyze trends, and map results for local communities.

Veilleux cocreates research with local riverine communities to ask questions about place, scale, erasure, disturbance and adaptation, and restoration or re-indigenization. She also engages with country governments, military, and international organizations about the efficacy of and legitimacy in development projects and plans for the earth and the people. She countermaps using GIS by working with local communities to restore Indigenous placenames to geographic locations and features on maps. She analyzes relationships between aspects of communities in transboundary watersheds within the framework of human or water security - agent based analysis considering environmental, economic, political, and social dynamics. She seeks to understand impacts of scale, the phenomena of eclipsing or amplifying impacts by where and how we look at place, and who or what we consider as valuable. She cocreates photographs of community lifeways and the stories that go along with these activities. More recently, she asks critical questions about equity in salient ways that include examining colonial histories, contemporary reprecussions of settlers and genocide in policy and business, what happens when extractive capitalism partners with governments, and how these realities result in climate changes to water and to ways of being (or even existing) in frontline communities.

Her previous research involves environmental disruption to river systems from dam development and the resulting impacts on the people and other species living along the river, at scale, over time. She has worked directly with communities on the Nile River, including the Abey (Blue Nile) and Mara subbasin systems; on the Mississippi River, incuding the Missouri River subbasin; and on the Mekong River. You can find out more on her website. 

*Please reach out if you want to read scholarship that is not immediately available.