SSHRC Grant winners from left to right: Martin Geiger, Dawn Moore, Amanda Clarke, Benjamin Woo, Dale SpencerPrisoner mistreatment, victim protections, city buses, and comic books: FPA researchers are pursuing a range of academic projects thanks to the support of Insight Grants and Insight Development Grants awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).The prestigious SSHRC Insight Grants, which offer financial support for long-term research projects of three to five years, are intended to build knowledge across disciplines and sectors, support new research approaches on complex topics, provide student experience, and influence society.
The winning projects showcase the wide range of fascinating research being conducted within the Faculty of Public Affairs:
Dawn Moore, Associate Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies
Are human rights abuses and prisoner mistreatment rare in Canadian prisons, or are they all too routine? Unfortunately, little is known about the day-to-day experiences of prisoners in this country. Rigid controls on academic researchers have created a serious knowledge gap in federal and provincial correctional systems – a gap that Professor Dawn Moore’s Prisons Transparency Project aims to fill.
As the winner of a Partnership Development Grant, Professor Moore will foster a new research partnership using a participatory-action research design that will bring together penal scholars, former prisoners and prisoner advocates. The project will raise public awareness about the realities of incarceration, contribute to policy development and lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary prison research network.
Martin Geiger, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (EURUS)
As Canada’s new Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship tackles the challenge of bringing 25,000 Syrian refugees to this country, he will likely draw on the services of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). As states, including Canada, increasingly outsource immigration programs, the IOM is finding an expanded role in migration policy-making.
Martin Geiger, Assistant Professor of Politics of Human Migration and Mobility with the Department of Political Science and Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, will expand his previous research on IOM and examine its growing importance for migration politics and what this means for our understanding of international organizations, the outsourcing of central policy tasks, as well as the effectiveness and socio-political implications of new approaches to migration.
Amanda Clarke, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration
A smartphone app that tells you when the bus is coming can improve rider experience in the moment – but will the data generated be used to improve overall transit management? Municipalities are embracing civic technologies as the new way to improve public services and solve social problems, but they do so in the absence of empirical evidence, says Professor Amanda Clarke.
Her study, encompassing an extensive survey and in-depth case studies, will gather much-needed data on the effectiveness of civic technologies, and determine whether they merely recreate the problems associated with analogue outsourcing experiments of previous decades.
Benjamin Woo, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Communication
Traditionally, the history of the comic book has focused on the creators, popular characters, and their place in literature. In contrast, Professor Benjamin Woo plans to create a more systematic picture of comics production in the United States.
He and his co-investigators, Professor Bart Beaty and postdoctoral fellow Nick Sousanis at the University of Calgary, won a SSHRC Insight Grant. They will take a representative sample of 5,000 comic books produced over an 80-year period to tell the story of the average comic book: its length, advertisements, design, distribution and how that has changed over time. The end result will be a written history of the formal and material development of the American comic book, from the 1930s to the present day.
Dale Spencer, Assistant Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies
The high profile suicides of Raetaeh Parsons and Amanda Todd reveal not only a disturbing new form of child and youth sexual victimization but also the difficulties police face in dealing with this type of crime, both online and in local communities. To help improve their response, Dale Spencer, assistant professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies, will use case studies of police organizations across Canada to examine police practices related to response to these crimes, the effect of police culture on officers’ responses to child and youth sex crimes, and the interactions that take place between specialized police units and victims.
You can learn more about the groundbreaking research being conducted at FPA in our special graduate studies issue of the online magazine, FPA Voices.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 in Groundbreaking Research, News, Research
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