Heather McLean

I have a background in community development, social planning and community arts practice. I pursued a PhD in Urban Studies at York University after working for five years on large-scale urban "revitalization" projects meant to re-invent disinvested public housing neighborhoods with arts and cultural facilities in Toronto. My research and teaching focuses on culture-led regeneration and creative city planning, precarious work, and arts interventions. I also engage in research with artists and community organizations to investigate the everyday ways that people are envisioning and implementing cooperative alternatives to neoliberal policies and austerity. Working from intersectional feminist, queer, anti-racist and participatory paradigms, I strive to involve participants in co-producing knowledge and possibilities. 

As a post-doctoral research in Glasgow, I examined underrepresented artists’ and activists’ efforts to forge cross sectoral solidarities within a paradigm of austerity urbanism. Specifically, I explored how arts collectives and artist-run centers are supporting disinvested communities in a time of public funding cuts. For this project, I engaged in collaborative mapping projects with Ailie Rutherford, CERN member, artist and founder of the Peoples' Bank of Govanhill and Kinning Park Complex, a resident-led social center.

Additionally, I have participated in performance-based research with arts collective including Dirty Plotz, a feminist cabaret that explores the historic and ongoing exclusion and erasure of women in art and social justice movements.