Audra Mitchell holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Department of Political Science. From 2015-18, Prof. Mitchell held the CIGI Chair in Global Governance and Ethics at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She has previously worked at the University of York, UK (2010-15) and the University of St. Andrews, UK (2009-10), and has held visiting fellowships at the Universities of Queensland (Australia) and Edinburgh (UK). Mitchell completed a PhD in Politics and International Studies at the Queen’s University of Belfast, UK (2009).

Prof. Mitchell’s research has made seminal contributions in and across the fields of global political ecology, (more-than-) human geography, environmental studies, international theory and the environmental humanities. For more than a decade, Mitchell has led a series of projects that show how interlocking logics of oppression (colonization, racism and ableism) drive global patterns of extinction and shape theories and practices of biodiversity and conservation. This work foregrounds the survival knowledge and resistance work of Indigenous, Black, crip, queer and other marginalized communities highlighting diverse strategies for collective survival. Prof. Mitchell’s other recent work includes influential interventions into discourses surrounding ecological, political and techno-scientific futures, and ground-breaking work on crip ecological knowledge. Prof. Mitchell’s earlier work has made major contributions to the emerging field of extinction studies; helped to bring more-than-human theories and methods from the margins to the center of critical debates in international and global theory; and made seminal contributions to discourses of anti-colonial peace-building. In addition, Mitchell has conducted cutting edge work on issues such as Indigenous outer space law and the ethics of global plastics pollution.

Prof. Mitchell has published more than 50 peer-reviewed works, and led a grant portfolio of over $2.6 million from a range of international funders. She also co-founded and led several international partnerships, networks and community-based research projects. For example, a recent partnership supported community- and land-based research projects in 19 Indigenous communities across Canada, Australia, the United States, Malaysia and the Philippines. Prof. Mitchell has supervised or mentored more than 60 Early Career Researchers and community-based researchers. She has consulted and/or advised government ministries, NGOs, museums, funders in Canada and many other countries.

Prof. Mitchell is a settler of Ukrainian and British descent living and working as an uninvited intergenerational guest on the lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.

Active research projects:

• a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project that aims to identify and resist emerging logics of eugenics in the context of ecological, political and technological crises and in areas such as conservation, global public health, climate policy, technoscience and crisis/disaster preparedness.
• a theory-based study of the ethics of unconditionality as a basis for eco-political relations and collective survival, which draws on insights from disability justice, abolitionist theory and environmental justice.
• a large, collaborative team-based project on Autistic and crip ecological knowledges, including the development of new methodologies, theoretical frameworks and original place-based research/research creation (e.g. sound studies, poetry) (funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, “Autistic Knowledge Ecologies”, 2023-2028).
• an interdisciplinary project on abolitionist theory (including carceral, institutional, border, ecological and other streams of abolitionist thought and practice) in a global context.
  ongoing collaborations in areas such as multi-species justice and earth-centred politics.