hotaka kobari

Hotaka Kobori

Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology, College of Natural + Applied Sciences

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What the Pandemic has Revealed

Introduce yourself...

I am a graduate student in my second year of Master of Science in the Agricultural and Resource Economics at the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology.

What are you researching and what do you hope comes out of your research?

With Professors Brent Swallow and Feng Qiu, I am studying about the open spaces in Edmonton. Ultimately, the aim of my specialization is to understand the values of things that are usually not priced in the market like green spaces!
Key question my research poses is how the pandemic influenced how much we value green spaces: hopefully my research will be able to document and quantify the COVID-19 effects and corresponding impacts on green equity.

How did presenting a Three Minute Thesis (3MT) help explain your research to the public?

Researching can be isolating and analyzing in my opinion tends to decompose big topics into solvable small pieces or questions, but 3MT requires the exact opposite tasks, namely engaging and lego-ing pieces of my research into a formidable product: these helped me to connect my research to the public and broader contexts.

What inspires you to do research?

Ai (love) for knowledge.

What are three keywords important to your 3MT?

Inequality, system, values

How does your research impact local, provincial, or global communities at large?

No single covid research can “uplift the whole people” from the crisis, but I think it’s a good start to inform communities of what the pandemic has done so that we can ask why it was able to do what it has done.

If you had to dedicate your research to anyone from the past, present, or future—who would it be and why?

Everybody who has supported, is supporting and will support me: and if I may, anybody who has suffered or currently is suffering from recent turmoils.


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Watch Hotaka's Three Minute Thesis