Laurier researchers awarded $1.5 million in new SSHRC Insight and Partnership Development Grants

June 16, 2022

Thanks to new funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Wilfrid Laurier University researchers will be tackling a range of timely issues, from business sustainability to reducing racial bias in police intelligence data. 

Nine Laurier faculty members were successful in SSHRC’s Insight Grant and Partnership Development Grant competitions for a total of $1.5 million in research funding – including Ciann Wilson, associate professor of Community Psychology, who was successful in both.

“Congratulations to our accomplished faculty researchers, all of whom are strongly deserving of this investment in their work,” says Jonathan Newman, vice-president: research. “Let me also commend the team of Laurier collaborators who help our faculty members succeed in a competitive research environment, from our administrative staff to our research facilitators.”

Partnership Development Grants

Wilson and her colleagues Maritt Kirst and Natalie Kivell were awarded $200,000 for their project “Equitable evaluation capacity-building: Co-creating frameworks for action.” Equitable evaluation is an emerging concept that pays attention to conditions such as structural inequities, privilege, power and justice, forcing evaluators to rethink their methods to avoid bias being built into the process. Together with their colleagues at the Laurier Centre for Community Research, Learning and Action and partner organizations such as United Way Waterloo Region Communities, the research team aims to help build evaluation capacity to support non-profits that serve equity-seeking groups, enabling them to gather evidence for decision-making and reporting.

Janet McLaughlin, associate professor of Community Health, was awarded $196,009 for her project “Engaging communities in developing culturally appropriate solutions to autism service disparities.” Co-founder of the Laurier Autism Research Consortium, McLaughlin’s research aims to improve service access and quality of life for all people living with autism and their families. Her collaborators will include Laurier co-investigators Margaret Schneider, Melody Morton Ninomiya and Stephen Gentles, and organizations such as Autism Ontario and Autism Speaks Canada.

Insight Grants

Emergency response measures during the COVID-19 pandemic could be parlayed into long-term policies to support low-income and marginalized people, but these public policy debates are strongly influenced by sensationalized narratives that often vilify the economically marginalized.

Ellen Russell, associate professor of Digital Media and Journalism, was awarded a $257,592 Insight Grant to investigate how these emotionally provocative narratives are contextualized by journalists and policymakers using economic research. She will analyze how these interpretations inform both news media coverage and subsequent government portrayals of their policies combatting economic, gendered and racialized marginalization.

Additional recipients:

• Diego Amaya, assistant professor of Finance, was awarded $105,430 for his project “Price discovery in the option market.”

• Ke Cao, assistant professor of Strategic Management, was awarded $31,571 for his project “Using sustainability certifications to scale up meaningful changes in businesses.”

• Sebastian Fourné, associate professor of Strategic Management, was awarded $85,039 for his project “Examining slack resource accumulation, usage for innovation, and as a source of resilience in times of shock.”

• Ken Paradis, associate professor of English, was awarded $49,397 for his project “The Evangelical imagination in the end times of white Christian America.”

• Carrie Sanders, professor of Criminology, was awarded $132,657 for her project “Opening the Blackbox: Examining the craft of police intelligence.”

• Robin Waugh, professor of English and Film Studies, was awarded $79,840 for his project “Child abandonment, language and landscape in the sagas of Icelanders.”

• Ciann Wilson, associate professor of Community Psychology, was awarded $400,000 for her project, “Living memories: Community-based storytelling of Indigenous and Black histories and realities in Canada.”