Sarah Paynter

I’ve been teaching geography at Douglas College since 2007 and my academic work focuses on geographies of identity, difference, and belonging. I’ve previously worked on community development programs in British Columbia and India. After living in Ottawa, Geneva, Bangkok, New Delhi, and Toronto, I’ve happily settled in Vancouver with my spouse, two dogs, and an excess of camping gear.

As an instructor, I want to engage students by exploring people's everyday geographies, as well as the global connections these geographies have. I spend my academic hours researching theories of teaching and learning, leading discussions on identity and difference, and, of course, exploring human geographies. I’m especially interested in development paradigms, population politics, decolonization, and nationalism studies, as well as understanding how people negotiate complex social identities across different times and places. While students may enter the geography classroom thinking about maps and memorizing country statistics and capital cities, they leave with knowledge on, and the ability to think critically about, other relevant human geographies such as skate parks, bathrooms, virtual worlds, bodies, segregated and colonized spaces, imagined communities, ‘the wilderness’, and suburban shopping malls.