Several faculty members have recently won prestigious grants totaling more than $300,000 to support their academic research. Professor Andrew Clement is being funded by the Standard Research Grants Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and will be given $144,300 over three years. As Principal Investigator, Prof. Clement will research “Performing Identities”. With the expansion of digital networking into many facets of everyday life, the project will research the serious personal and human rights concerns, and fill gaps in our understanding of how people perform and experience their individual identities in their everyday encounters with identification based services and technologies. FIS professor David Phillips is a collaborator on the grant, as is Professor Colin Bennett of the University of Victoria.

 

Professor Lynne C. Howarth was also awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Standard Research Grant in the amount of $104,682. "Creating Pathways to Memory: Enhancing life histories through category clusters and metadata-rich repositories,” will be funded over three years to examine the “sense-making”, sorting, categorizing, and recall strategies of individuals experiencing mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and, subsequently, explore the sensory and modal resources that best support those strategies in order to create or enhance pathways to memory.

Professor Stephen Hockema, along with FIS post-doctoral researcher Dr. Laura O'Grady and graduate student Lisa Betel, have been awarded an Image, Text, Sound and Technology (ITST) grant worth $29,100 from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Services (SSHRC). The grant, "Sense-making and credibility of health information on the social web: A multi-method study assessing tagging and tag clouds" will fund a truly interdisciplinary research project as four co-applicants are from outside of FIS: Prof. Robert Luke (George Brown College, Dept. of Applied Research and Innovation), Prof. Nadine Wathen (UWO, FIMS), Prof. Mark Chignell (UofT, MIE) and Dr. Alex Jadad (UofT, HPME). FIS professor Aviv Shachak is a collaborator on the grant.

Additionally, Professor and Dean, Brian Cantwell Smith, has been given a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) award of $25,000 to research “Reclaiming the World: The Future of Objectivity”.