University of Lethbridge researchers receive more than $600,000 in funding

FUNDING AWARDED THROUGH THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL

A dozen researchers at the University of Lethbridge have been awarded more than $600,000 in new funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for a range of projects, including agriculture supply chain management and repatriating Métis music.

The Insight Development Grants were announced earlier this year and were designed to support emerging scholars and research, during the early stages, with up to $75,000 available for one or two years. From the Dhillon School of Business, four researchers secured more than $187,000 in funding for their projects.

Duckjung Shin’s research is looking at human resource management as a social system within an organization and examines the interference between work and life domains. Adriane MacDonald will be examining the potential of sensemaking tools to improve communication and problem solving in multi-stakeholder partnerships, an approach espoused in the United Nations global sustainable development agenda.

The other two research projects from the Dhillon School of Business include Jocelyn Wiltshire from the Calgary campus who will be looking at the dark side of leaders and how they influence behaviour in the workplace, and Alireza Tajbakhsh, who will be examining the existing literature on agriculture supply chain management in both crop and livestock sectors in Canada.

Five researchers in the Faculty of Fine Arts — Dana Cooley, Bryn Hughes, Jackson Two Bears, Amandine Pras and Devon Smither — secured awards worth nearly $280,000 for their projects.

Cooley’s project involves an interactive installation that translates a participant’s brain activity data through a Rube Goldbergesque chain of digital and early scientific measuring devices that spin, turning the signals into light, sound and movement. Hughes plans to dig into the factors that allow people to activate different musical languages to determine what musical features contribute most to syntactic violations, and why some musical gestures sound wrong in one kind of music, but not in another.

Two Bears’ research will explore the ways in which the creative use of digital technologies can support innovation, transmission and transformation of Indigenous creativity and cultural practices, while providing a site for critical dialogue and reflection. Pras’ research focuses on the democratization of the 21st century recording studio and the production techniques and creative process that define it, and Smither is conducting a study which looks at the marginalization of women artists and artistic realism during the first three decades of the 20th century.

The final three recipients of the grants include: Monique Giroux, Canada Research chair and professor in Indigenous Studies who’s research centres on the repatriation of Métis music; Kara Granzow, professor of sociology who is looking into preventing sexualized colonial violence; and Julie Young, professor of geography and Canadian Research Chair, who is examining the impacts of Canadian refugee deterrence policies.

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