FASS Faculty Members Receive SSHRC Connection Grants
Congratulations to the following FASS faculty members who were awarded Connection Grants in the May 2025 competition:
Patricia Ballamingie (Geography and Environmental Studies) and a team of eight co-applicants and collaborators (including Peter Andrée from Political Science and Irena Knezevic from the School of Journalism and Communication) received outreach stream funding for “Mobilizing Knowledge from Food Movement Elders: Building a Digital Library of Actionable Wisdom.” This initiative preserves and makes accessible the experience of leaders in food justice, governance, and systems transformation. Using research interviews with these leaders, the team will create a digital library of textual and audiovisual material to ensure that past knowledge, successes, and lessons learned will be remembered, built upon, and re-interpreted as new food system challenges arise.
Jennifer Evans (History), along with co-applicant Sandra Robinson (School of Journalism and Communication), received outreach stream funding for “Hate, Conspiracy Theories, and the Challenge to Democracy.” Bringing together students, junior and senior scholars, and community stakeholders, this project explores the historical, psychological social and political dimensions of conspiratorial thinking across time. The team will hold a workshop to explore a series of related case studies out of which will come academic publications, a public lecture, policy briefs, teaching modules and resources, and social media content to build capacity that organizations, universities, government and community can draw upon to address the threats conspiracy theories pose today.
Kevin Nunes (Psychology) received event stream funding for “Violent Thoughts: Constructs, Measures, Interventions and Synthesis” and will hold a meeting of experts of violent cognitions to clarify and refine our understandings of the nature of these conditions, distinctions/overlap between them, how to measure them, and how to change them for the better. There is little evidence on whether violent cognitions have a causal effect on violent behaviour; this event will enable diverse perspectives to facilitate advances in theory, research, knowledge transition and practice, which will ultimately permit more effective and efficient efforts to reduce violence.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connection Grant supports events and outreach activities geared towards short-term, targeted knowledge mobilization initiatives.