FASS Faculty Members Receive SSHRC Connection Grants, Partnership Engage Grant

Congratulations to the following FASS faculty members who were awarded Connection Grants in the November 2025 competition:

• Monica Patterson (Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies) received outreach stream funding for an international project titled “Building Democracy.” Patterson and her team, members of the SSHRC Partnership Grant “Thinking Through the Museum,” will organize a week-long Winter Camp for Curators for 20 South African children (aged 12-14), which will culminate in an exhibition to be held in July 2026 in South Africa and at partner universities in Canada. The children’s exhibition will also be a focus of a 5-day workshop in South Africa comprised of the Partnership Grant team. The project will produce meaningful dialogue between scholars, museum professionals, child members of the Children’s Movement (an NGO) and the broader public to address how traditional museums have been slow to transform into representative institutions that can serve multicultural societies.

• Émilie Urbain (Department of French) received event stream funding for the conference “Language Policy and Planning: From Talk to Action” to be held in Ottawa in June 2026. This international conference will bring together researchers in linguistics, political science, education, sociology and beyond as well as policymakers and practitioners in the field to discuss issues in language policy and planning, including language assessment, language rights, Indigenous languages, heritage languages, official bilingualism, language acquisition, language discrimination and transnational language policies.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connection Grant supports events and outreach activities geared towards short-term, targeted knowledge mobilization initiatives. 

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Congratulations to Anna Hoefnagels (Music) on receiving a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Engage Grant (PEG) in the September 2025 competition. 

In “Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) Cultural Resurgence and Akwesasne Community Renewal: Narratives, Initiatives and Impacts of The Native North American Travelling College,” Hoefnagels will examine how storytelling, traditional teaching, and social song and dance have been used the Native North American Travelling College to promote and transmit traditional Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) knowledge and language within and beyond the Akwesasne Mohawk community. 

Through consultation and interviews with current and past staff members, cultural educators, and community members, complemented with archival analysis, the project examines how the College’s activities and teachings affected shifts in the valuation of cultural knowledge and practices, and impacted political and social conditions for community members.