University of Alberta researchers will seek new insights into culture and language, education, artificial intelligence, climate adaptation and more, thanks to new funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
In all, 53 U of A researchers are receiving nearly $8 million through SSHRC’s Partnership Development, Partnership Engage, Insight and Insight Development grant programs.
“These newly funded projects reflect a deep commitment to addressing pressing societal matters and building safer, stronger communities,” says Dr. Aminah Robinson Fayek, vice-president of research. “The success of our researchers from 14 faculties in these SSHRC competitions is also a reflection of the high-calibre research in social sciences and humanities happening across our university. We look forward to seeing the impact of this work and remain committed to empowering our researchers as they continue to drive social and cultural change.”
SSHRC Partnership Development Grants provide $75,000 to $200,000 over one to three years to foster new research partnerships and test new partnership approaches that can be adapted or scaled up to a regional, national or international level.
Partnership Engage Grants provide up to $50,000 to support one-year research projects involving a post-secondary institution, and a public, private or not-for-profit organization.
Insight Grants provide funding of $10,000 to $500,000 over two to five years to support emerging and established researchers in the social sciences and humanities who are building knowledge and understanding about people, societies and the world.
Insight Development Grants provide up to $100,000 to support early-stage projects for up to two years, enabling researchers to develop new methods, theoretical approaches and ideas.
Partnership Development Grant recipient
Alexa Ferdinands (Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences)
Building a partnership-based model for engaging youth in foodscapes research
$196,517
Partnership Engage Grant recipient
Paulina Johnson (Faculty of Arts)
Mîhskocîyâyâwin (Changes in Life Spirit): Nîpisîhkopâhk views of climate change in Nipiy (water) and Maskihkiy (traditional medicines)
$49,350
Insight Grant recipients
Clark Banack (Augustana Campus)
Exploring the social and political implications of the consolidation, death, and even rebirth, of local newspapers in rural Canada and the USA
$431,705
Howard Harshaw (Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation)
Social-ecological challenges at the human-wildlife interface: Coyotes, zoonotic disease and public health
$494,160
Robert Losey (Faculty of Arts)
Histories in transition: Indigenous interactions and archaeological collaborations in southern Saskatchewan
$289,419
Michael Lounsbury (Alberta School of Business)
Entrepreneurial Knowledge Hub creation
$192,964
Sarah Nickel (Faculty of Arts)
Knucwentwécw-kt, We Come Together: Unearthing our histories of the Kamloops Indian Residential School
$375,339
Patti Pente (Faculty of Education)
Teaching the machine, teaching ourselves: AI-art as pedagogy for ethical AI literacy in education
$122,610
Valeri Sokolovski (Alberta School of Business)
Stranded value: Pricing transition risks using fossil fuel firm valuations
$43,535
Joanne Weber (Faculty of Education)
Deaf aesthetics infused arts integration in inclusive deaf education
$353,628
Carrie Demmans Epp (Faculty of Science)
Re-envisioning teaching and learning in the age of generative AI: The question of computer-science education
$362,055
Mark Gierl (Faculty of Education)
Using generated testlets to improve mathematical literacy
$252,226
Courtneay Hopper (Faculty of Arts)
Early herding in arid landscapes: Human-environment interaction and lessons for climate resilience in southern Africa and beyond
$480,395
Mark Huson (Alberta School of Business)
Liquidity dynamics surrounding ETF births and deaths
$77,076
Jungsik Hyun (Alberta School of Business)
Understanding the geography of trade diversification and the economic resilience of cities and firms using Canadian microdata
$87,917
David Lewkowich (Faculty of Education)
The good, the bad, and the ugly: (An)archival approaches to teachers’ lived experiences of keeping secrets
$220,188
Rob Shields (Faculty of Science)
Between friends/Entre amis: Fifty years on the Canada-U.S. border
$108,503
Evelyn Steinhauer (Faculty of Education)
Reinforcing pathways for a long-term increase of accredited Indigenous K-12 educators in Canada: A culturally grounded approach to expanding teacher education rooted in wîcihitowin and manâhcihitowin to uplift mêskotônamâtowin
$400,004
James Wright (Faculty of Science)
Shining light on hidden gems: Using AI to draw attention to unseen post-secondary applicants
$300,704
Ingo Brigandt (Faculty of Arts)
Conceptual engineering for social justice and environmental purposes
$117,262
Jessica Eisen (Faculty of Law)
Animal relations: Maternal practice, rupture, and repair
$115,553
Howard Nye (Faculty of Arts)
The ethics of effective collective action and plant-forward food system transitions in Canada
$125,000
Rebecca Purc-Stephenson (Augustana Campus)
The stories farmers tell: How farmer identities shape meaning, inclusion, and agricultural well-being
$417,204
Ashantha Ranasinghe (Faculty of Arts)
Immigrant entrepreneurship in Canada
$85,285
Terri Tomsky (Faculty of Arts)
ISIS lives: Life writing and cultural narratives of radicalization
$93,022
Insight Development Grant recipients
Adelina Barbalau (Alberta School of Business)
Beyond charity: The economic case for financing climate adaptation, and how to design it
$63,764
John Enman-Beech (Faculty of Law)
Foundations of equity in Canada
$34,560
Tahereh Firoozi (Faculty of Education/Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry)
Do AI corrections improve the quality of multiple-choice questions? Perceptions of university instructors
$65,188
Caylee Hong (Faculty of Law)
Frontline municipalities: Decommissioning oil wells in Alberta’s cities, towns and villages
$89,633
Samantha Louie-Poon (Faculty of Nursing)
Networks of connection: Tracing the invisible infrastructures of connectedness in Chinatown
$94,215
Sylvia Ijeoma Madueke (College of Social Sciences and Humanities)
Documenting Black Canadian literature in translation: Visibility, knowledge access and community
$72,177
Paul Messinger (Alberta School of Business)
Beyond what brands say: The role of reply strategy in public brand-consumer conversations
$65,016
Sidarth Moktan (Alberta School of Business)
Housing returns and household wealth over the life cycle
$75,563
Sarah Moore (Alberta School of Business)
Something old or something new? Measuring and understanding reconsumption behaviour
$50,433
Gillian Robinson (Campus Saint-Jean)
Investigating the governing power of “age-appropriateness” in Alberta’s shifting educational landscape
$91,236
Bryan Spencer (Alberta School of Business)
Interpreting wildfire intelligence: An ethnographic study of predictive analytics and environmental ambiguity
$71,090
Xiaoyun Wang (Faculty of Arts)
An eye on help: Developing interactional competence in offering help in Mandarin as a second language
$66,149
Yanhao Wang (Alberta School of Business)
Agreeing to disagree: Political partisanship and team performance
$61,086
Jiatong Zhong (Faculty of Arts)
Do family policies affect firms? Evidence from two recent Canadian reforms
$37,144
Olubukola Alimi (Faculty of Engineering)
Negotiating toxic beauty: Digital narratives and Black immigrant lived experiences
$85,120
Gaang Lee (Faculty of Engineering)
Understanding psychological injury hazards in sociodynamic systems via stress-and sociometric-aware wearables and temporal graph neural networks
$99,700
Youran Lin (Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine)
English second-language learners’ speech sound production: toward a causal model of multidimensional individual difference factors
$77,717
Jerine Pegg (Faculty of Education)
LIT-Sci: Literacy-integrated digital texts to support science reading and reasoning
$93,236
Blair Attard-Frost (Faculty of Arts)
Advancing artificial intelligence governance systems for communities
$67,818
Elmond Bandauko (Faculty of Science)
Contested rationalities of spatial formalization of street trading in Harare and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (“CONTESPACE”)
$100,000
Claire Benny (School of Public Health)
Understanding youth and parental attitudes toward road safety and driving in Alberta
$98,026
Wendy Hoglund (Faculty of Arts)
Individualized learning supports for reading and writing: Variation and resiliency among children at risk for learning difficulties
$93,947
Zahra Kasamali (Faculty of Education)
Language as living pedagogy: A two-Nation pilot of Indigenous research governance at the Aboriginal Teacher Education Program (ATEP)
$100,000
Tamara Pearl (Faculty of Law)
Urban Indigenous identity and legal culture in Edmonton and Saskatoon
$79,645
Ke Wang (Alberta School of Business)
Power of the crowd: Freedom of speech and government stewardship
$64,667
Longzhou Wang (Alberta School of Business)
Transport infrastructure and economic transformation: How connectivity shapes technology diffusion, resource reallocation, and productivity
$45,874
Yang Yi (Alberta School of Business)
Municipalities’ financial constraints and the redistribution of pollution
$75,354
Yao Zheng (Faculty of Arts)
Parental cultural socialization in the preservation of culture, tradition and ethnic-racial identity among Asian Canadian communities
$98,931