Each year, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) awards prestigious scholarships to top-ranked graduate student candidates across Canada. We are very pleased to announce that two graduate students from McGill's Language Education program have won this year's major scholarships:
Aisha Barise has won the Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral Program (SSHRC CGS-D) (Joseph-Armand Bombardier Graduate Scholarship). Her PhD research, supervised by Dr. Angelica Galante, is titled A Radical Mapping of Multilingual Politics: Towards a Human and Poetic Generative Grammars. This work attempts to map multilingual politics and poetics by linking various radical thinkers from Black and African studies such as (*but not limited to*): Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Dionne Brand, M. Nourbese Philip, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on limits and possibilities surrounding linguistic/tongue (dis)possession, belonging, (in-)security, (anti-)essentialism, and reclamation for the diaspora. It further attempts to relate these multilingual politics and poetics as responses to calls for inventing a new grammar for Black Canada that resists various nuanced erasures of Blackness in Canada (Walcott, 2003). New grammars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s ririkana ‘to remember’ (Kikuyu) approach and what M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand, and Claire Harris call ‘Grammars of Dissent’ (Morrell, 1994), create possibilities to swim in opaque waters, by voicing semantic non-compositionality, in between traditional/biocentric linguistic contours and tones.
Chama Laassassy has won the Canada Graduate Scholarship - Masters Program (SSHRC CGS-M) (Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship) and the Educator Practitioner-Researcher award from McGill's Department of Integrated Studies in Education. Her MA research, supervised by Dr. Susan Ballinger, is titled Making extracurricular activities curricular: Measuring the impact of non-classroom language practice in university language learning centres. Chama is extremely passionate about learning outside of the classroom. Various of her personal experiences learning languages and coordinating alternative language education programs have ignited an interest in exploring how activities taking place outside of the classroom can provide students with opportunities to practice their language skills, to socialize with the language, and to have fun while learning. Chama is concurrently working on an asset-based community development initiative aimed at addressing dropout prevention in her native country Morocco, specifically in Nador and its outskirts. This initiative employs alternative education methods and play-based pedagogy to ensure teens stay in school.
Congratulations to this year's winners of these prestigious scholarships. We wish you success in your research journey!
