My Story

Hi, my name is Leah Fulton (she/they). My name is spelled a bit differently from how it is pronounced. I answer to both Lay-uh, or Lee-uh, but I prefer Lay-uh.

I grew up in Mi'kma'ki, otherwise known as Nova Scotia, on the Atlantic coast. My mom holds French ancestry, and my dad is of Scottish descent. When I was younger, I went to an Acadian francophone school, and I got used to being called lay-uh; that's why I go by that now.

Living on the Eastern Shore, a stone's throw from an ever-changing coastline, altered by wind and waves from the Atlantic Ocean. My love for the salt air and sea is deep in my bones - it's the wind that'll git ya - but it's the people that make you stay.

I intended to go to post-secondary to study engineering, but I quickly realized my curiosity was driven by people and places, not just their spaces. From 2026-2020, I studied in the Bachelor of Community Design and completed an Honours in Urban Design and Planning, with a minor in Geography. During this time, I completed a cross-institutional exchange and travelled overseas to the University of Western Australia to learn how they live down under. Complementary to my degree, I earned a Certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), where I developed a spatial problem-solving lens to planning issues. These skills were applied in both housing and landscape connectivity projects post-graduation.

Despite living so close to the ocean my entire life, there was a clear gap for me - what happens beyond the shoreline? As such, I continued my studies in the Marine Affairs Program, Master of Marine Management, at Dalhousie University, where I worked closely with Coastal Action to understand the economic impacts and spatial distribution of abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG) in Canada's most productive lobster fishing area (LFA). To make this research accessible to fishers at the local and global levels, this work was translated into an ArcGIS Story Map and submitted to the 2021 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition for Restoring our Oceans, where it won 1st place in the University Track.

While conducting research, I held a summer position as a Park Planner for the Government of Nova Scotia, Department of Lands and Forestry, Parks and Outreach Division, where I primarily reviewed Martinique Beach Provincial Park to inform an update to the Martinique Beach Management Plan. Both my research and park planner positions led to a pilot project to integrate end-of-life fishing rope as barrier fencing for sand dunes at Lawrencetown Beach Provincial Park. My interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving was acknowledged, where I was awarded the Marine Affairs Millennium Prize Interdisciplinarian of the Year.

Upon graduating, I began working as a contract researcher, undertaking projects with organizations such as Parks Canada, the Ocean Frontier Institute, Ontario Parks, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and the Confederacy of Mainland Mi'Kmaq. Most of my projects focused on using GIS technology and analysis to support coastal planning and management initiatives, and on facilitating and analyzing community mapping workshops. These experiences exposed me to the realities of taking a systems-thinking approach to GIS, and to the fact that Western knowledge is often dominant in GIS analyses and cartographic representation, with Indigenous knowledge filling gaps rather than being woven together.

With a desire to pursue innovations in mapping multidimensional knowledge beyond cartographic conventions, I returned to academia to pursue a PhD, co-supervised by Dr. Chris Bone and Dr. Crystal Tremblay at the University of Victoria, and externally supervised by Dr. Peter Keller (emeritus), becoming a member of the Simulating Resilient Landscapes (SURREAL) Lab. I am currently a PhD candidate, and my dissertation examines how multidimensional knowledge is mapped and how wellbeing is spatially represented.

I live, work and play on the lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people (known today as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations), who have lived here since time immemorial. I am an uninvited guest on these lands and participate in treaty responsibilities. In my free time, I love crossing contours on my bike or on foot through the trails, drinking coffee, and being a connoisseur of carrot cake.