About

Madi is sitting on a blue chair while piecing together a large scale puppet. She has curly brown hair and is a wearing a black sweater. She is smiling.

I’m Madeline (Madi) Donald (she/her, PhD). I was born a visitor on Coast Miwok territory, raised a traveller, and was, until very recently living and researching in and with the Okanagan watershed, unceded and occupied Syilx homelands.

Living with narcolepsy, my participation in academia actively seeks to make and hold space for a variety of temporal needs.

I am interested in humans’ perception of possibility and how the relations we perceive as possible are guided by the ways in which we attend to our environments. Easily labeled a cultural geographer or participant in the environmental humanities, I work in the interstices of fields of inquiry; I play with plants and words and pictures, talk to people and think about how we can effectuate communication, and am interested in exploring the possibilities of perspective-sharing for discipline agnostic inquiry.

My research focuses on sustainability through the concept of attention. It is grounded in relational research methodologies and currently saturated by the riparian habitats of the Okanagan watershed. I am interested in the mechanisms through which attending to possibilities for interaction in/with our environments can bring human people closer to living in respectful and ecologically sustainable relation with the lands/waters that give us life.