Julia Christensen

Julia Christensen holds a PhD in Geography from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Her doctoral thesis was the recipient of the Starkey Robinson Award for high quality graduate work on the geography of Canada. Following her PhD, Julia received a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), which she held at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. She is assistant professor of geography and planning at Roskilde University in Denmark and a research fellow at the Institute of Circumpolar Health Research in Yellowknife. Her research focuses on geographies of home and homelessness in the northern Indigenous community context. She is also a creative writer and uses storytelling as both a research method and a mode for knowledge sharing. Her work has been published in a variety of academic and literary journals, edited volumes, magazines, and newspapers.

Julia has received doctoral and postdoctoral awards from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and SSHRC. Julia was born and raised in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.

Experience as Trudeau Scholar

My time as a Trudeau Scholar has been a profound experience. I became a part of this community at an important moment in my academic career: the outset of a doctoral program, trying to determine how best to use my studies to engage with the world around me. Through the relationships I have developed with fellow Scholars as well as Mentors and Fellows, my eyes have been opened to the many and diverse ways we can combine scholarship with our individual and collective responsibilities to communicate, to engage, to act. The Trudeau Foundation honours not only progressive academic research, but equally a common willingness among members of the Trudeau Foundation community to walk in other worlds simultaneously, to challenge boundaries and redefine them. In particular, I have been inspired by the many members of this community who use the arts-film, creative writing, photography, music-as a way to inspire positive change in the world, and to share knowledge. My future course has been indelibly marked by the relationships I have built during my Trudeau scholarship; relationships that I know do not end here but will continue to flourish as I follow new paths.