Watt-Cloutier named Mount Allison visiting scholar

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Inuk climate change advocate, will be a visiting scholar at Mount Allison University in 2011-12.

Watt-Cloutier will work with the campus community and deliver a public lecture during the international COP-17 climate change negotiations held in late fall in South Africa.

"I am thrilled to be at Mount Allison as a visiting scholar. Working with students and the campus community is a real pleasure and is an extension of my life’s work: creating a better understanding of Inuit culture and the Arctic environment for the world," she said in a media release.

Watt-Cloutier, who is a member of the Order of Canada, will also be finishing her forthcoming book, The Right to Be Cold.

Mount Allison described her as a leading environmental and cultural activist who helped negotiate the United Nation’s Stockholm Convention prohibiting the use of a class of toxic chemicals.

She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for her work linking climate change to human rights.

"Sheila Watt-Cloutier has much to offer students, faculty, and the general public. I am excited that we at Mount Allison and in the region will have the opportunity to hear her enlightened, holistic, and inspired message," Berkeley Fleming, Mount Allison’s vice-president of research and academic, said in a media release.

"We are most honoured that she has agreed to come to Mount Allison."

She will collaborate with Ian Mauro, the Canada research chair in human dimensions of environmental change.

The two will be developing multi-media materials and tools to support Watt-Cloutier’s book.