Humanities and Social Sciences receive $1.5 million

18 projects funded at the U of M

JENELLE PETRINCHUK STAFF

The University of Manitoba has just received close to $1.5 million from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), an independent federal government agency that funds university-based research through annual, national peer-review competitions.

The SSHRC announced on June 15 that they are providing $81.3 million in funding for 92 universities and colleges throughout Canada. Nine hundred and sixty-nine research projects across the country will benefit from this money.

The SSHRC is the main federal granting agency that funds social science and humanities research projects at the University of Manitoba.

Vice president (research) at the U of M Joanne Keselman pointed out that the grants from SSHRC not only allow researchers to cover the costs of their projects but also provides them with the ability to hire students as research assistants.

“I’m sure that in a number of cases, a good deal of funding will be used to provide graduate students support. So clearly [the funding] has a double benefit, not only of facilitating the completion of the project, but it also provides students with great training experience in conducting research,” said Keselman.

At the U of M the money will go towards 18 different research projects spanning in a wide variety of disiplines.

Projects such as city planning professor Rae Bridgman’s research on the design, planning and development of housing for chronically homeless people will progress thanks to the funding. Bridgman will be conducting a study of the creation of Times Square North in Toronto that will provide affordable housing for seniors, students and other tenants suffering from illnesses or addictions.

English professor Brenda Austin- Smith’s study of the emotional significance of film will also progress with the funding now in place. She is particularly interested in interviewing and examining senior women and the affect that the old “weepy” or “tearjerker” films, from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, had on them.

“I’m really curious about the way previous popular cultures affected their audience emotionally, and one of the ways to track that is to get people to talk to me about the films that made them cry,”Austin-Smith, said.

Other researchers that received funding include Alison Calder, also the department of English, for her project on developing a new critical model for understanding prairie culture, and accountiung and finance professor Gady Jacoby for his study of corporate bond liquidity pricing.