2 Concordians are awarded nearly $5M for social sciences and humanities investigation
The Social Sciences and Humanities Investigation Council of Canada (SSHRC) has awarded two Concordia School of Arts and Science professors practically $5 million merged in investigation funding.
Erica Lehrer, professor of record, and Kim Sawchuk, professor of conversation reports, are recipients of SSHRC Partnership Grants just about every value around $2.5 million around 7 a long time. The council’s internet site explains that the grants “support formal partnerships among academic scientists, firms and other associates that will advance know-how and knowing on essential challenges of mental, social, financial and cultural importance.”
Paula Wooden-Adams, interim vice-president of study and graduate studies, says she seems to be ahead to observing how their perform progresses about the coming a long time.
“For Concordia to obtain two of these prestigious awards is truly a testomony to the calibre of their investigation and the progressive vision that Kim and Erica have for their jobs.”
Pondering By means of the Museum
Lehrer is a sociocultural anthropologist as perfectly as curator and founding director of the Curating and Community Scholarship Lab. She is the principal investigator for the undertaking Thinking By means of the Museum: A Partnership Strategy to Curating Complicated Understanding in Community.
It delivers alongside one another lecturers, museum practitioners and neighborhood representatives to examine and creatively react to the absence of diversity in museum staff and governance, the absence or misrepresentation of disempowered teams in exhibits and strained relations between museums and the publics they serve.
The project’s goal is to combine its community of 20 husband or wife organizations in Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa and the United States and 34 varied, planet-class experts to change museum principle and practice. The team will draw on essential idea and lived expertise to improved realize museums’ implication in and prospective for redressing contentious historical and cultural challenges.
Lehrer says she hopes to see museums renovate into definitely consultant institutions suited to provide 21st-century multicultural societies.
“The present social crises present an unparalleled chance for museums to not only rethink how they can go on to run, but also what management job they can perform in the worldwide task of healing historic divisions and accelerating progressive social improve,” she states. Lehrer cites the significance of the Black Life Issue, Idle No Additional and #MeToo actions as illustrations, alongside with new heritage activism in Poland and South Africa.
“The team will use the ability and likely of museums and curating to critically assess and answer to legacies of mass violence and injustice throughout cultural contexts. We hope to catalyze beneficial, sustainable variations.”
Getting older in Information
For her component, Sawchuk is no stranger to SSHRC Partnership Grants, obtaining obtained a practically $3-million, seven-year grant in 2014 for her challenge Ageing + Interaction + Technologies (ACT): Encountering a Electronic Globe in Later Lifetime. Housed at Concordia, ACT is an worldwide, interdisciplinary and multi-methodological investigation task that investigates the transformation of ordeals of getting older with the proliferation of new kinds of mediated communications in networked societies.
Her new SSHRC Partnership Grant, Aging in Data, provides collectively an interdisciplinary community of students and group-primarily based activists and companies to investigate the intersections of age scientific tests, communications/media studies and crucial information research.
Nineteen associate businesses and 34 co-applicants and collaborators from 10 countries in Europe, North America and Australia will examine growing old in an era of unprecedented electronic knowledge-accumulating.
“Within the investigation staff, age is not just a number or variable: it offers a lens to replicate on an ever more datafied environment. Within just this context, the COVID-19 pandemic is magnifying pre-present age-associated social and political information inequities and divisions that we search for to handle and redress,” states Sawchuk, who retains the Concordia College Analysis Chair in Mobile Media Studies.
“This moment offers the workforce not with an option but an obligation to go after these exploration inquiries.”
Pascale Sicotte, dean of the College of Arts and Science, states she is motivated by the collaborative scope of the projects.
“Where some may well see insurmountable obstacles, Erica and Kim see alternatives,” Sicotte notes. “These two projects exemplify what is probable when academia reaches outside of borders, genuine and perceived, to perform with communities to tackle today’s most pressing difficulties.”
In addition to the SSHRC Partnership Grants awarded to Lehrer and Sawchuk, Concordia is also the recipient of virtually $2 million in SSHRC Perception Grants, which are awarded to “support investigation excellence in the social sciences and humanities.”
View the finish listings of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada award recipients.
Locate out extra about SSHRC Partnership Grants and SSHRC Perception Grants.