Dr. Michele-Lee Moore

Michele-Lee Moore is the Director of Transdisciplinary Education and her research focus is on social innovations and transformations, with a focus on water governance

Moore’s research seeks to build and mobilize knowledge about social innovations - ones that allow us to transform and develop towards positive and just futures that support social-ecological-cultural resilience. Primarily, she has focused on topics of transformative agency, social-ecological systems resilience, and social and governance innovations that are better able to grapple with complex system dynamics in local and transnational water governance.

As Director of Transdisciplinary Education, Moore also advances scientific understandings of how to design, facilitate, and co-create processes and learning spaces that support transformation.

Her work on transformative agency and capacity explores the role of networks, reflexivity, emergence, and most recently, imagination in supporting transformation and governance innovation. Moore’s work centres multiple ways of knowing, relationships (human-human, and human-nonhuman), and healing the past to support alternative futures.

Moore also has extensive leadership experience in inter- and transdisciplinary programmes. For example, Moore was the Deputy and then Director of SRC’s Guidance for Resilience in the Anthropocene: Investments for Development (GRAID) programme (2016-2020), currently leads the Water, Innovation, and Global Governance Lab (WIGGLab) based at the Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria Canada (2012-current), co-led the Rockefeller Global Fellowship on Social Innovation (2013-2016), and co-led a national water governance capacity strengthening programme in Canada (2014).

Through her love for both teaching students and supporting practitioners’ working on real-time complex issues, Moore has happily been experimenting with different mediums for communicating, co-creating, and applying science, through presentations, produced videos, podcasts, magazine articles, scientific publications, social innovation labs, facilitated learning processes, and more. Moore also currently serves as a Subject Editor for Ecology & Society and as Editor for Sustainability Science.

Moore has studied across different disciplines for each degree, including Ecology (BScHons, The University of Western Ontario), Geography (MSc, University of Victoria), and Global Governance (PhD, Wilfrid Laurier University, Balsillie School of International Affairs). Moore has spent time conducting field work on remote glaciers in northwest Canada, on shrimp aquaculture ponds in Thailand, and on watershed governance and networks in different watersheds around the world.