Lakehead University researchers receiving more than $1 million from SSHRC

Lakehead University researchers are receiving more than $1 million in funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

Dr. Cheryl Lousley, an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Interdisciplinary Studies, and her team are receiving a $319,473 Insight Grant.

For up to five years, they will study how three aesthetic modes – the poetic, the documentary, and the speculative – are used by Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian-diasporic writers, filmmakers, and artists to grapple with and change debilitating political ecologies.

“We will examine how cultural production, political economy, settler-colonialism, and environmentality intersected in four periods of the Canadian nation-building project,” Dr. Lousley said.

This research will focus on historical- and site-specific case studies, including racialized railway ecologies; notions of foreign and invasive species; resilient cities; Canadian labour and resource extraction in Latin America; and Indigenous “wonderworks,” which are modes of the fantastic.

This research will fill a large gap. Across the social sciences and humanities, research on racialization and ecology in Canada is limited, generally focusing on specific events of environmental injustice, not broader social formations of colonialism, race and ecology.

The research team will be comprised of three tenured scholars, four tenure-track emerging scholars, a postdoctoral researcher, and a number of student research assistants.

Dr. Jodie Murphy, an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work, along with her research team, Dr. Karen McQueen, Dr. Lori Chambers and Ainsley Miller, are receiving a $145,305 Insight Grant to explore sexual assault disclosure among sexual and gender minorities for up to three years.

A better understanding is needed of the disclosure experience and unique needs of sexual and gender minorities who are sexually assaulted in order to develop interventions and safe spaces for them to attain support for sexual victimization.

This qualitative research seeks to explore the first-hand accounts of four distinct groups of sexual and gender minorities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) who experience sexual assault and disclose it to a formal support provider (counsellors, police, medical professionals, teachers, religious leaders, community providers).

Statistics have found that individuals from sexual and gender minority populations are sexually assaulted at a rate three times higher than the heterosexual population in Canada and violent victimization (including rape and sexual assault) is four times higher than heterosexuals in the US.

“Research on sexual assault has typically been conducted through a heteronormative lens that assumes females are victims and males are perpetrators, which neglects the unique experiences and perspectives of sexual and gender minorities who experience sexual assault,” Dr. Murphy said.

Dr. Pauline Sameshima, a Professor in the Faculty of Education and the Canada Research Chair in Arts Integrated Research, is receiving a $97,950 Aid to Scholarly Journals Grant over three years, which will go toward increasing dissemination, discoverability and readership of the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies.

“This funding will be used to pay the managing editor, five bloggers, a communications coordinator, and technology support,” said Dr. Sameshima, who became the journal’s editor-in-chief in 2015 with Dr. Holly Tsun Haggarty, a Lakehead alumna, as managing editor.  

This is the second Aid to Scholarly Journals Grant received by JCACS. In 2019, JCACS received $100,930 to develop innovations to build JCACS’ community, support, and mentorship structures. 

JCACS expanded to 24 people including a French team. The journal also developed a Facebook community, a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, and a Medium publication. 

Dr. Sameshima said the registered number of users has grown from 448 in 2015 to 2,544 in 2021. In 2015 the total number of PDF downloads was 4,031, whereas in 2021 it was 29,965.

JCACS publishes articles in English and in French (as RACEC) that address curriculum issues of interest to Canada and Canadians and an international readership. It is the journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (CACS), which is a constituent association of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education.

“Congratulations to each researcher and thank you to SSHRC for its continued support for Lakehead University,” said Dr. Andrew P. Dean, Lakehead’s Vice-President, Research and Innovation.

“These projects show the variety of quality research that Lakehead University does in the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences. They also highlight the important research in the fields of social justice and equality at the University.”

The Research Support Fund is a federal funding program for post-secondary institutions in Canada to support some of the costs associated with managing research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

In 2020/21, Lakehead University received nearly $2 million in assistance from the Research Support Fund to support the indirect costs of research, which includes costs for supporting the management of intellectual property, research and administration, ethics and regulatory compliance, research resources, and research facilities.

New SSHRC Funding

Total amount received: $1,002,901

Aid to Scholarly Journals (three-year grant)

Dr. Pauline Sameshima, Faculty of Education,   Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies/La revue de l'association canadienne pour l'étude de curriculum, $94,950.

Connection Grants (one-year grants)

Dr. Ellen G. Field, Faculty of Education (Orillia), Youth Sustainability Summit: Enabling Youth-led Dialogue and Action, $24,354.

• Co-investigators
  • Dr. Linda Rodenburg, Interdisciplinary Studies

Dr. Jula Hughes, Bora Laskin Faculty of Law, Killed for Our Own Good? Ending Police Violence Against Indigenous People in Need of Assistance, $49,670.

• Co-investigators
  • Dr. Karen Pearlston, University of New Brunswick
  • Robin Whitehead, Bora Laskin Faculty of Law
• Collaborators
  • Elizabeth A. Blaney, Congress of Aboriginal Peoples
  • Michelle A. Perley, New Brunswick Aboriginal Peoples Council
    

Insight Grants (three- to five-year grants)

Dr. Kathy M. Kortes-Miller, School of Social Work, Disrupting Death; An examination of Canadian Experiences with Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), $289,226.

• Co-investigators
  • Dr. Arne J. Stinchcombe, University of Ottawa
  • Dr. Kimberley J. Wilson, University of Guelph

Dr. Cheryl Lousley, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Racialized Ecologies in and Beyond Settler-Colonial Canada: Documentary, Speculative, and Poetic Texts and Contexts, $319,473.

• Co-investigators
  • Dr. Anita E. Girvan, Athabasca University
  • Dr. Nandini A. Thiyagarajan, Acadia University
  • Dr. Renae Watchman, McMaster University
  • Dr. Susie C. O'Brien, McMaster University
  • Dr. Tania G. Aguila-Way, University of Toronto
• Collaborator
  • Dr. Joanne Leow, University of Saskatchewan

Dr. Jodie Murphy-Oikonen, School of Social Work, Sexual Assault Disclosure Among Sexual and Gender Minorities, $145,305.

• Co-investigators
  • Dr. Karen A. McQueen, Lakehead University
  • Dr. Lori Chambers, Lakehead University
• Collaborators
  • Ainsley Miller, Lakehead University
    

Knowledge Synthesis Grants – Emerging Asocial Society (one-year grant)

Dr. Vicki Kristman, Department of Health Sciences, Virtual Work From Home & Mental Well-being: A Scoping Review, $29,923.

• Co-investigator
  • Dr. Lynn Martin, Lakehead University

Partnership Development Grants (one-year grants)

Dr. Kathryn Amanda Maranzan, Department of Psychology, Identifying and Understanding the Stigma Experienced by Injured Workers through a Systematic Review and Stakeholder Focus Group Engagement, $25,000.

• Co-investigators
  • Bill J. Chedore, Canadian Injured Workers Alliance
  • Lynn K. Cooper, Canadian Injured Workers Alliance
  • Minerva J.A. Porelle, Canadian Injured Workers Alliance
• Partner
  • Canadian Injured Workers Alliance, Thunder Bay, Ontario

Dr. Robert Petrunia, Department of Economics, Exploring Alternative Data Sources for Timely Studies of Business Dynamics, $25,000.

• Collaborators
  • Dr. Heng Chen, Bank of Canada
  • Dr. Kim P. Huynh, Bank of Canada
  • Dr. Anson Ho, Toronto Metropolitan University
  • Dr. Danny Leung, Statistics Canada
  • Dr. Marcel-Cristian Voia, Université d’Orléans
• Partner
  • Bank of Canada

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Media: For more information or interviews, please contact Brandon Walker, Media, Communications and Marketing Associate, at (807) 343-8110 ext. 8372 or mediarelations@lakeheadu.ca.

Lakehead University is a fully comprehensive university with approximately 9,700 full-time equivalent students and over 2,000 faculty and staff at two campuses in Orillia and Thunder Bay, Ontario. Lakehead has nine faculties, including Business Administration, Education, Engineering, Graduate Studies, Health & Behavioural Sciences, Law, Natural Resources Management, Science & Environmental Studies, and Social Sciences & Humanities. Lakehead University’s achievements have been recognized nationally and internationally, including being ranked, once again, among Canada’s Top 10 primarily undergraduate universities in Maclean’s 2021 University Rankings; as well as included in the top half of Times Higher Education's 2022 World Universities Rankings for the third consecutive year, and the number one university in the world with fewer than 10,000 students in THE’s 2022 Impact Rankings (which assesses institutions against the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals). Visit www.lakeheadu.ca.