FASS Research Award Recipients

Nahla Abdo, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

This award will assist Abdo in writing a book based on several years of research she conducted among Palestinian women ex- political detainees about their life experiences before, during, and after prison.

In the context of growing international solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners, the staging of prolonged hunger strikes, and the 2010 release of a large number of political prisoners (over 1000), Abdo’s research is very timely.

Abdo’s research is original: it is the first academic undertaking on Palestinian women political prisoners, based on the stories of the women themselves. With data based on first-hand information this research seeks to analyze Palestinian women’s anti-colonial struggle, their agency, political movement, and their treatment as political detainees.

Abdo’s book will document the life experiences of women political detainees. This project is significant in terms of the general implications it has on existing literature on women political prisoners globally as well as Palestinian women more specifically. There is no single academic book-length publication focusing specifically on the lives and experiences of women political detainees.  Abdo’s will be a first.

Historically, women world-wide have been involved in the struggle against colonialism, imperialism, and authoritarian regimes. Their involvement, role and agency, especially in national liberation movements have been documented in various studies for the past three decades or so. Not unlike their male counterparts, women have taken an active role in all forms of struggle, including armed resistance. However, there is not a single academic book on Arab women political prisoners, let alone Palestinians who have been detained in the thousands. This feminist anti-imperialist study of Palestinian women ex-political detainees provides an important contribution to research on women, revolutions, national and anti-colonial resistance. This proposed book, in other words, seeks to break the silence on Palestinian women political prisoners.

 

Patricia Ballamingie, Department of Geography & Environmental Studies /Institute of Political Economy

This Award will assist Ballamingie in advancing two major pieces of research.  Ballamingie is integrally involved in two SSHRC-funded collaborative research teams, one aimed at strengthening community-university engagement, and the other at building sustainable, local food systems.

Project 1: Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement

Ballamingie serves as the Academic Co-Lead for the Community Environmental Sustainability Hub of the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) project, led by Ted Jackson (Public Affairs) and managed in cooperation with Geri Briggs (Canadian Alliance for Community Service-Learning). With Community Co-Lead, Todd Barr, from the Trent Centre for Community-Based Education, she acts as Principal Investigator (PI) of a research hub. CFICE is an action research project that aims to strengthen Canadian non-profits, universities, colleges, and funding agencies to build more successful, innovative, resilient and prosperous communities. Combining community-based demonstration projects with critical policy analysis, CFICE aims to answer the question: How can community-campus engagement be designed and implemented in ways that maximize the value created for non-profit community-based organizations?

Project 2: Nourishing Ontario: Sustainable Local Food Systems

This collaborative research team, Nourishing Ontario: Sustainable Local Food Systems Research Group, led by Alison Blay-Palmer (Wilfred Laurier University), includes research nodes across Ontario (and recently, they have extended these to include partners across Canada and abroad). Ballamingie’s colleague from Political Science, Peter Andrée, and herself serve as Co-Leads of the Eastern Ontario Research Node, and act as PIs for the region. This research builds on two years of collaborative work that developed an inventory of community food initiatives in Ontario, and explored the scope and scale of their impacts. Notably, the team developed a Community Food Toolkit, created network concept maps to visually represent the complex workings of a nonprofit organization, and augmented the research capacity of Just Food Ottawa through participatory action research.

Links

Institute of Political Economy CFICE Just Food Nourishing Ontario Canadian Alliance for Community Service-Learning

 

Brian Greenspan, Department of English Language and Literature

Greenspan will use his FASS Award to make significant progress on his SSHRCC-funded book project, entitled, Dream Media: Mapping the Utopian Archive. Ever since Thomas More invented the genre, utopianists have anticipated the social effects, both positive and negative, of new technological developments. Yet the field of Utopian Studies has been slow to recognize the ways in which actually existing new media affect utopian representation, and how social media networks enable new sites of collective dreaming and world-building. Many utopian scholars ignore the mediality of utopia while retaining a decided media bias toward fictional narratives in print, which is positioned as a “universal medium” appropriate to the study of universal social progress. In his book, Greenspan proposes to map the archive of New World utopian and dystopian narratives, 1880 to the present, and trace the migration of utopian spatial play into new forms of expression, including networked transmedia narratives, locative media and video games.

 

Robert Coplan, Department of Psychology

This FASS Research Award will aid Coplan in to advancing his work on a large-scale research project recently funded by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant.  The project is titled Shyness, Participation in Organized Activities, and Socio-Emotional Functioning in Early Childhood.

Feeling somewhat wary when meeting new people is a common experience for many children. However, about 15% of children are considered extremely shy, routinely experiencing fear and anxiety in social contexts to a degree that hinders their abilities to interact with other children. Shy children often withdraw from social interactions and, thus, may ‘miss out’ on the important and unique opportunities that the peer group context affords for the acquisition of social, cognitive, and communicative skills. Moreover, even in early childhood, extremely shy children are at greater risk for adjustment difficulties such as internalizing problems (e.g., anxiety) and poor peer relations (e.g., rejection). However, not all shy children experience the same degree of maladjustment. Thus, the question arises as to why some shy children do better than others over time. Accordingly, researchers have begun to explore potential moderating factors that may alter the developmental pathways of shy children. Preliminary results suggest that: (1) positive relationships with influential adults (e.g., parents, teachers) may help to buffer young shy children from some negative outcomes; (2) early intervention programs involving peers may increase the social interactions of extremely shy preschoolers; and (3) participating in organized sporting activities may help to reduce anxiety in older shy children.

Organized activities (e.g., team sports) provide a rich context for positive development. Indeed, participation has been linked to positive outcomes such as school success and improved social relationships. Organized activities typically offer relatively safe environments for children, where they are surrounded by interested adults, interact with peers who share a common interest, and have an opportunity to develop confidence and expertise. Participation in such activities may be especially beneficial for shy children because of their relative lack of confidence and lower rates of positive social interactions. However, if their participation is unsuccessful, it may also lead to discouragement and a heightened sense of rejection in this vulnerable population.

The primary goal of this proposed program of research is to examine links between shyness, participation in organized activities, and socio-emotional functioning in early childhood. In particular, we will explore how activities might serve as a protective (make things better) or exacerbating (make things worse) factor in the adjustment of shy preschoolers. We will also explore how child characteristics and parental factors contribute to children’s activity participation; examine how positive relationships with activity leaders might promote resilience in shy children; and better elucidate the potentially complex nature of the associations between activity participation and socio-emotional functioning in early childhood.

Two studies are proposed: the first provides a snapshot of preschoolers’ activity participation; the second entails a multi-site, multi-cohort, longitudinal design to explore the implications of activity participation over time. We will assess child shyness and indices of socio-emotional functioning with parent/teacher ratings and child reports. Aspects of children’s participation in organized activities will be measured with parent/instructor ratings, child self-reports, and behavioural observations. Results from this study will help us understand the socio-emotional impact of activity participation in early childhood and the specific implications of participation for shy children. Findings could also assist in the development of suggested guidelines for parents pertaining to activity engagement for children and the establishment of best practices for activity leaders.