McGill researchers receive SSHRC Partnership Engage Grants
The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) announced the recipients of its latest competition of Partnership Engage Grants including a total of $100,000 awarded to four McGill researchers.
Partnership Engage Grants (PEG) provide short-term and timely support for partnered research activities between researchers and single partner organizations from the public, private or non-profit sector. McGill researchers received approximately $25,000 each in funding through the PEG program.
Professor Régine Debrosse (School of Social Work) will partner with Chalet Kent, a non-profit organization that supports youth in the Montreal neighborhood of Côte-des-Neiges. The aims of Debrosse’s project are to assess how young people of colour in Côte-des-Neiges view their identities and future aspirations particularly around postsecondary education, and then work with Chalet Kent staff to develop programming that responds to these findings. Debrosse plans to recruit young people to the project’s leadership and research teams, helping to foster their research skills.
Together with researchers from Boston University, Professor Alex Ketchum (Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies) will partner with Prism Comics, a non-profit organization supporting LGBTQIA-friendly comic books, comics professionals, readers, and educators. Through the creation of a collection of comics and essays on queer food, the project will examine the potential of collaborations between cartoonists and scholars in the social sciences and humanities to make research on, by, and for LGBTQIA2S+ communities more accessible.
Professor Juan Serpa (Desautels School of Management) will partner with Creciendo Juntos, a Costa Rican non-profit organization focusing on rural community empowerment through entrepreneurial education. Recognizing pest management is a significant challenge for these farmers in Costa Rica, Serpa and his team have developed a mobile app that collects data on pest encounters. They now aim to use this data to identify patterns in farmers' pest-fighting strategies and develop a decision support system to optimize these strategies. Serpa’s team will also disseminate the app to help farmers in other countries with support from Data Mangrove, a Sustainability Data Analytics Hub launched by Serpa in 2021.
Fostering public engagement around questions of sleep equity and the place of rest, fatigue, and sleep within Asian communities is the goal for a project led by Professor Alanna Thain (Department of English) in collaboration with the Korean Film Festival of Canada (KFFC) and the Sociability of Sleep (SoS), a research-creation initiative which Thain co-directs with Aleksandra Kaminska (Université de Montréal). Propelled by the two-year theme of the KFFC’s forthcoming 10th and 11th editions: Arts and Technology: Sleep, Dreams, and the Body, the team will co-curate a series of screenings, workshops, and artist residencies to explore and showcase how Asian artists have addressed sleep in cinema, video, new media, zines, and installations. Thain’s team includes, from McGill, Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol (Department of Art History & Communication Studies) and postdoctoral fellow Ylenia Olibet (Department of English); two other collaborators are part of Thain’s FRQSC-funded research team Collective for Research on Epistemologies and Ontologies of Embodied Risk (CORÉRISC), Mario de Giglio-Bellemare and Kris Woofter.