“I came back to Saskatchewan to do my PhD because I wanted to study rural Saskatchewan,” says Fletcher, who grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan.
“This is a place I feel I understand, a sense of belonging and a certain sense of responsibility to,” she says.
Now a full professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies with the University of Regina, Dr. Fletcher’s research examines how gender and social inequality shape the lived experience of climate change through the lens of climate disasters like flooding, drought and wildfire.
Fletcher received a full scholarship to do her undergraduate degree at the U of R before receiving her master’s degree from York University in Toronto. She began her PhD at the U of R in one program before moving to the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (JSGS) PhD program in her third year after her supervisor moved to a different university.
Dr. Greg Marchildon stepped up to be her co-supervisor and brought her over to JSGS where Fletcher finished her PhD in Interdisciplinary social science, graduating in 2013. Her PhD research brought together a number of disciplines in an attempt to answer a specific question - how women in agriculture are affected by major changes, specifically public policy and climate.
“I was looking at how climate change affects farmers in the sense of extreme weather events like flooding and drought,” she says. “I wanted to find out if and how those big picture changes affected the way women work on the farm. Their choices on what work they do, do they use their labour to adapt to changes in any way.”
To do that Fletcher’s research brought together the disciplines of gender studies, sociology and public policy.
“I interviewed 30 women from across the province, sitting down in people’s kitchens and talking to them.”
Fletcher found that policy and program-related paperwork were a major burden, and which was done predominantly by women.
“But at the same time there was this importance of certain social safety nets,” she says. “In particular those social safety nets that were seen as most important which were related to flooding and drought adaptation.
“I was surprised by that because there tends to be, especially in the rural prairies, an assumption that everybody wants a hands-off approach by government, everybody wants independence, and that wasn’t quite the case. It was more tailored where certain supports are needed because events like flooding and drought exceed the individual capacity of producers, the individual capacity of communities, so there was the need for timely and crucial supports in the event of disaster.”
She says the women also felt a loss of control on their own farms as changes in the political economic structures of agriculture gave more power to corporations and less power for producers.
“And climate extremes exacerbate that lack of control because it is unpredictable and severe,” she says. “Your farm’s entire income can be wiped out in a flood. And because they were women, they also felt disconnected from control of the farm itself at a micro level because gender relations were, and still can be, the idea that farming is a masculine occupation and that men are the central farmers.”
Fletcher says doing her PhD at the U of R was invaluable on so many levels.
“I had the benefit of wonderful supervision during my PhD,” she says, adding her supervisors taught her how to research while also giving her the chance to be independent.
“Some of the opportunities I was given you wouldn’t see at larger universities,” she says. “I learned the ability to develop projects that are community engaged, that respond and draw the community's diverse perspective into the research. And at the same time, it will hopefully result in some tangible recommendations.”
Her current research is focused on a more complex inequality lens such as how rural and Indigenous communities are affected by flooding and wildfire, how gender or socio-economic class makes a difference.
“These different forms of inequality that people experience come together to create different experiences of climate disasters and different needs of support,” says Fletcher, who also has taken on the role of Academic Director of the Community Engagement and Research Centre at the U of R.
She says that research isn’t just about consulting and doing interviews, but including community level concerns and priorities and building that into the project. For example, Fletcher was involved in a project with the Ochapowace Nation documenting their Elders’ knowledge of the land, environment, and the community’s history.
“We were interested in looking at their experience in flooding,” she says. “We ended up doing a documentary series that helped to preserve the knowledge of the Elders that they had about the environment and the community. It’s about working and partnering with communities (geographical or identity communities) to find out how we can build the priorities of the communities and their interest into the research.”
Fletcher is now planning to do more research on the effects of climate change on marginalized groups, and in particular those people who are precariously housed in Regina.
“Housing came up as a theme in previous projects where the quality and availability of housing makes a huge impact in how people are affected by heat waves or flooding.”
The project will be in partnership with a number of community-based organizations. Fletcher says the flexibility to do interdisciplinary research has been invaluable.
“The career that I’ve had and am doing is because of the support I received during my PhD,” she says. “I was able to work with leading researchers who gave me the opportunity to gain research skills that I wouldn’t have had in a different PhD program.”