Ian Mauro

Dr. Ian Mauro is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg. He holds a BSc in Environmental Science and PhD in Geography from University of Manitoba, and was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in Ethnoecology at the University of Victoria. He previously held a Canada Research Chair in Human Dimensions of Environmental Change at Mount Allison University.

As both a community-based researcher and filmmaker, Mauro works at the interface between the social and ecological sciences, and is a pioneer of multi-media methodologies, scholarship and education. He uses participatory video to collect, communicate and conserve local and indigenous knowledge, an approach that allows people who live on the land to tell their own stories, in their own language, and within the landscapes where their knowledge has been generated.

His films—focused on genetically modified crops, food security and climate change—have been translated into numerous languages and screened globally at academic conferences, film festivals and venues such as the United Nations, Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic and the Royal Ontario Museum. He co-directed the influential Inuktitut language documentary Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change with acclaimed Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk. The pair continue to collaborate on a project on industrial development in the Canadian Arctic. Mauro’s most recent research documentary, Climate Change in Atlantic Canada, was toured across the region with Dr. David Suzuki.

Mauro has spent over a decade living with Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic, hunting and eating country foods, and learning to speak Inuktitut. His ongoing research in the Arctic, Atlantic and Prairie regions of Canada endeavours to help us better listen to the language of the land, and offer the world strategies for healthy human interaction with the biosphere.

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