Biography

Shiri Pasternak, BA, MA

Shiri Pasternak joined POLIS in 2005. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Cultural, Social and Political Thought from the University of Victoria and has worked most extensively on food security issues, with groups such as the "Harvest Seed Tour"—traveling across Canada, meeting with farmers and rural community members—and with the Montreal-based research collective, "Food Not Lawns." Her graduate research focused on a genealogy of the "improvement" discourse that justified land appropriation from Indigenous peoples in North America (c17th) through to justifying the patenting of seeds saved and cultivated by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Her work as Associate Director of the Forum on Privatization and the Public Domain led her to organize "The Commons Conference," at UVic in April 2006. Her current project is the Property Taskforce, a think-tank dedicated to studying and confronting the barriers individual property rights pose to indigenous sovereignty, ecological governance, and political freedom.