Research excellence celebrated in the Faculty of Arts

It has been a momentous year for Brandon University scholars in the Faculty of Arts!

Through 2016, some 21 faculty members have been recognized for their research nationally and abroad, awarded international grants and Tri-Council grants; some have secured residencies and fellowships, others have published books, edited collections and written plays.

Here is a brief look at Faculty of Arts successes this year:

Dr. Jonathan Allan

(Canada Research Chair, English & Creative Writing and Gender & Women’s Studies).

• SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Principal Investigator
• New Book: Reading from Behind. The Cultural Significance of the Anus
• New Edited Collection: Virgin Envy: The Cultural (In) Significance of the Hymen

Insight Development Grant Details: Dr. Allan was awarded $27,917 for his project entitled Discursive Analysis of Circumcision and Masculinity. Project Description: To circumcise or not to circumcise? Expectant parents often find themselves tackling this question. The answer to the question is complicated by diverse medical opinions, religious traditions, secular norms. This project sets out to understand how the foreskin is represented, theorized, and critiqued in the social sciences and humanities, in the biomedical sciences, and in policy documents of medical associations. When completed, this project will be one of the first full-length studies to consider circumcision by way of the foreskin and what it is, what it does, and why it matters.

Book Details: In a playful, yet scholarly romp through “low” and “high” culture, Jonathan Allan asks why — since we all have one and use it every day — do we squirm at the mere mention of the anus? How is it that Kim Kardashian’s derriere can break the internet, Pippa Middleton’s behind can create a “butt lift” craze, and yet we cannot handle a discussion of anality? And why, given that we all have one, has the anus been caught up in the very “ground zero of gayness”?

Edited Collection Details: From the medieval romance to Bollywood films to True Blood, the essays in this collection set out to destabilize our understanding of sexual purity and the many assumptions that surround it. In particular, the hymen is called into question. How is virginity determined for those without a hymen? How do we account for the ways in which the “geography of the hymen” has changed over the course of history? And what about male and queer virginity? Also addressed are issues of commodification, postcoloniality, and religious diversity.

Dr. William Ashton

(Rural Development Institute)

• SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant, Principal Investigator, with Dr. Lori Wilkinson (Co-I) and Dr. Kim Lemky (Co-Is)
• SSHRC Partnership Grant, Co-Investigator, with Dr. William Reimer (PD), Dr. Ken Bessant, and Dr. Doug Ramsey (Co-Is)

Knowledge Synthesis Grant Details: Dr. Ashton and his team were awarded $24,997 for their project entitled Usage of Emerging “Big Data” Bases in Immigration Research. Project Description: The project investigates big data related to immigration and immigrants in Canada to better understand how to encourage more researchers to access and benefit from it.

Partnership Grant Details: Brandon University and its research team were awarded $2,500,000 for the project entitled Rural Policy Learning Commons: Building Rural Policy through International Comparative Analysis. Project Description: The Rural Policy Learning Commons seeks to improve rural and northern policy through international comparison, exchange, and collaboration among more than 90 participants from 9 countries.

Dr. Ken Bessant

(Rural Development)

• SSHRC Partnership Grant, Co-Investigator with Dr. William Reimer (PD), Dr. William Ashton, and Dr. Doug Ramsey (Co-Is)

Partnership Grant Details: Brandon University and its research team were awarded $2,500,000 for the project entitled, Rural Policy Learning Commons: Building Rural Policy through International Comparative Analysis. Project Description: The Rural Policy Learning Commons seeks to improve rural and northern policy through international comparison, exchange, and collaboration among more than 90 participants from 9 countries.

Dr. Yvonne Boyer

(Canada Research Chair, Native Studies)

• CIHR Training Grant, Principal Investigator
• CIHR Planning Grant, Co-Investigator, with Dr. Kathy Moscou (PI), Prof. Karen Batson, Dr. Chris Beeman, Dr. Chris Brown, Dr. W. Dean Care, and Dr. Karen Rempel
• Law Foundation of Manitoba Award, Principal Investigator
• Canadian Bar Association Award, Principal investigator

CIHR Training Grant Details: Dr. Boyer was awarded $24,999 for her project entitled, The Prairie Indigenous Knowledge Exchange Network (PIKE-Net). Project Description: The project aims to strengthen research networks in First Nations, Metis and Inuit health by increasing mentorship opportunities for First Nations, Metis and Inuit trainees, and New Investigators.

CIHR Planning Grant Details: Dr. Boyer and colleagues were awarded $11,998, for the Health and Aboriginal Land-Based Education Research (HEALER) Symposium. Project Description: Disparities in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit (FNMI) communities may be reduced by increasing knowledge of cultural, language, age, and gender barriers to health literacy.

Canadian Bar Association Grant Details, 2016: Dr. Boyer was awarded $12,605 to carry out an environmental scan and a review of the Federal Correctional System and the policies that affect Indigenous rights to health.

Law Foundation of Manitoba Grant Details, 2016: Dr. Boyer was awarded $18,000, to carry out a review and legal analysis of Section 35 rights within the Constitution Act, 1982 and their applicability to Indigenous health.

Dr. Derek Brown

(Philosophy)

• Award Recipient, Templeton Foundation, University of Cambridge

Award Details: Dr. Brown was awarded £14,000. Project Description: The “New Directions in the Study of Mind Project” investigates theories of the mind in philosophy and psychology that do not presume that the mind is reducible to the physical world. The initiative is funded by The Templeton Foundation and managed by The University of Cambridge. Dr. Brown’s project applies this non-reductive commitment to colour and colour vision. His funding will go towards a sabbatical visit to The University of Cambridge in fall 2016 and an international workshop in spring 2017.

Professor Kevin DeForest

(Visual & Aboriginal Art)

• Manitoba Arts Council Residency

Residency Details: Professor DeForest was awarded $12,500 for a Manitoba Arts Council sponsored residency at the ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program) in Brooklyn, New York. It was a three month stay that provided him with a studio among 35 other visual artists and curators from around the world (including Scandinavia, Asia, Central America, the US and Canada). It allowed him to produce work, engage with the New York art world, and make contacts with other international artists and curators.

Dr. Rosanne Gasse

(English & Creative Writing)

• New Book: The Feral Piers: A Reader’s Experience of the British Library Cotton Caligula A XI Manuscript of Piers Plowman

Book Details: In The Feral Piers, Gasse asks what is the concept of a literary text when that construct exists in so many variant and feral forms, as is the case for the multiple modern editorial reconstructions and the more than fifty surviving manuscripts and early print editions of Piers Plowman? This book takes a daring and innovative approach to answering this question. It is a micro-study of one particular historic version of Piers Plowman, its scribe, and its fifteenth and sixteenth century readers. It reads the Cotton Piers not as an ossified relic whose value lies in what can be gleaned from it about modes of scribal production and Cot’s textual relationship to other Piers manuscripts, but as a living text meant to be experienced and enjoyed as a work of literature in its own right.

Dr. Rhonda Hinther

(History)

• New Book: Perogies and Politics: Canada’s Ukrainian Left, 1891-1991
• Recipient, Research Manitoba Bridge Funding Grant

Book Details: In Perogies and Politics, Dr. Hinther explores the twentieth-century history of the Ukrainian left in Canada from the standpoint of the women, men, and children who formed and fostered it. For twentieth-century leftist Ukrainians, culture and politics were inextricably linked. The interaction of Ukrainian socio-cultural identity with Marxist-Leninism resulted in one of the most dynamic national working-class movements Canada has ever known. The Ukrainian left’s success lay in its ability to meet the needs of, and speak in, meaningful, respectful, and empowering ways to its supporters’ experiences and interests as individuals and as members of a distinct immigrant working-class community. This offered to Ukrainians a radical social, cultural, and political alternative to the fledgling Ukrainian churches and right-wing Ukrainian nationalist movements. Dr. Hinther’s colourful and in-depth work reveals how left-wing Ukrainians were affected by changing social, economic, and political forces and how they in turn, responded to and challenged these forces.

Research Manitoba Award: Dr. Hinther was awarded $10,000, for a project titled “Love in the Age of Internment: World War II, the Defence of Canada Regulations, and Canada’s Leftist Political Prisoners”. Project Description: During World War II, the Canadian government criminalized to an unprecedented extent the far left. Authorities targeted women and men for their radical activism, involvement in host of leftist ‘ethnic hall’ socialist organizations, and ties to the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). Many were detained – some as convicted prisoners with definite prison sentences and others as internees without charge. Nonetheless, political solidarity and individual morale endured. Personal and public resistance sustained those incarcerated, their kin, friends, and their wider activist communities. This study offers broader and more nuanced perspectives on this specific episode of political policing, serving to expand understandings of responses to the repression of dissent in Canada and globally.

Dr. Emily Holland

(Anthropology)

• SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Co-Investigator

Insight Development Grant Details: Dr. Holland is a co-investigator on a $71,000 grant through Simon Fraser University entitled Biological Expression of Childhood Social Realities in the Past from the Study of Juvenile Skeletal Remains. Project Description: This collaborative project utilizes juvenile skeletal remains from two documented collections (Portugal and Italy) to investigate growth disruption as a response to social and cultural adversity in order to understand childhood experiences in the past, including gendered differences in health.

Dr. Alison Marshall

(Religion)

• SSHRC Insight Grant, Principal Investigator

Insight Grant Details: Dr. Marshall was awarded $287,395 for her project entitled, Understanding Chinese Experiences of Racism through Sport Participation and Entertainment Production in Northern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Project Description: The project investigates the social histories of immigrant communities (Chinese, Japanese, Syrian, Muslim, and Filipino) that have been framed by Chinese experiences of racism. It has produced two monographs, multiple peer-reviewed publications, exhibitions, community presentations, workshops and collaborative projects.

Dr. Corinne Mason

(Sociology and Gender & Women’s Studies)

• SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Principal Investigator

Insight Development Grant Details: Dr. Mason was awarded $21,597 for her project entitled, Queering the Mainstream: LGBT Rights and the Development Industrial Complex. Project Description: The global development industry is newly concerned with global LGBT rights; Dr. Mason’s research will map and critically analyze emerging policies, programming, and campaigns related to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression at the transnational level.

Dr. Allison McCulloch

(Political Science)

• SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Principal investigator
• SSHRC Insight Grant, Co-Investigator

Insight Development Grant Details: Dr. McCulloch was awarded $38,379 for her project entitled Power Sharing and the External Governance of Self Determination Disputes. Project Description: Power-Sharing and the External Governance of Self-Determination Disputes. This project assesses the normative and instrumental reasons why international third-party mediators recommend power-sharing arrangements as the dominant approach to ending wars and building peace in deeply divided societies, particularly when such arrangements may require prolonged international involvement.

Insight Grant Details: Dr. McCulloch was awarded a $182,438 grant for her project entitled, Gender, Peace and Power-Sharing in Political Transitions. Project Description: This project considers the challenges of reconciling power-sharing arrangements, which exclusively emphasize the accommodation of ethnic and ethnonational groups in government, with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, which calls for the improved inclusion of women in conflict transformation processes.

Professor Peter Morin

(Visual & Aboriginal Art)

• SSHRC Insight Grant, Co-Investigator

Insight Grant Details: Professor Morin is a co-investigator on a $270,226 grant through the University of British Columbia Okanagan entitled Crossing Media, Crossing Canada: Performing the Land We Are. Project Description: Using social media platforms and innovative cross-platform publishing/presentation techniques to support physical transformations of performance art works into two- and three-dimensional, “Crossing Media, Crossing Canada” will explore how contemporary methods and technologies alter and augment the creative process, producing new readerships and new audiences.

Dr. James Naylor

(History)

• New Book: The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future

Book Details: The New Democratic Party’s eternal debate – whether it remains true to its roots – begs the question of what, exactly, its roots are. James Naylor’s The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future demonstrates that this is a far more interesting and contentious question than we assume. Not just social reformers ahead of their time, the founders were labour activists attempting to challenge the evils of 1930s capitalism – unemployment, fascism, and war – by rallying a diverse and fractious movement behind their working-class ideals.

Dr. Doug Ramsey

(Rural Development)

• SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals Grant; Principal Investigator (Journal Editor)
• SSHRC Partnership Grant, with Dr. William Reimer (PD), Dr. William Ashton, and Dr. Ken Bessant (Co-Is);
• SSHRC Partnership Grants, Co-Investigator

Aid to Scholarly Journals Grant Details: Dr. Ramsey was awarded $61,200 for the Journal of Rural and Community Development. Journal Funding: The Journal is entering its sixth year of SSHRC funding, which has allowed for improvements to the review and copy editing process and for expansion of the Journal’s reach while maintaining its core vision of free access to all.

Partnership Grant Details: Dr. Ramsey is a co-investigator on a $2,500,000 grant through the University of Manitoba entitled Wa Ni Ska Tan. Project Description: The project is named Wa Ni Ska Tan, which is Cree and Ojibway for “Wake up” or “Rise up,” and it examines the positive and negative implications of hydro-power development for the environment and nearby Indigenous communities across Canada. This project is just beginning this fall.

Partnership Grant Details: Dr. Ramsey is a co-investigator on Borders in Globalization, a $3,940,000 grant through the University of Victoria. Project Description: The overall project seeks to better understand borders in the 21st century. Doug’s research investigates borders as limiters and enablers for cross-border shopping tourism. He plans to study two border studies: Switzerland-Germany and North Dakota-Manitoba.

Dr. William Reimer

(Rural Development Institute)

• SSHRC Partnership Grant, Project Director, with Dr. William Ashton, Dr. Ken Bessant and Dr. Doug Ramsey (C-Is)

Partnership Grant Details: Brandon University and its research team were awarded $2,500,000 for the project entitled Rural Policy Learning Commons: Building Rural Policy through International Comparative Analysis. Project Description: The Rural Policy Learning Commons seeks to improve rural and northern policy through international comparison, exchange, and collaboration among more than 90 participants from 9 countries.

Dr. Wilder Robles

(Rural Development)

• SSHRC Partnership Letter of Intent Grant, Co-Investigator

Partnership Letter of Intent Grant Details: Dr. Robles is a co-investigator on a $19,996 letter of intent grant through the University of Manitoba entitled Northern Teaching Lodges: Learning Partnership for Building Human Resources, Community Development and Improving Infrastructure in First Nation communities. Project Description: The proposed research and education program will focus on community development and capacity building research regarding community healthy living priorities within an Indigenous Knowledge (IK) context.

Dr. Kelly Saunders

(Political Science)

• SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Co-Investigator

Grant Details: Dr. Saunders is a co-investigator on a $57,343 grant through Ottawa University entitled, Aboriginal Self-Government: A Case Study of the Métis. Project Description: The project aims to develop a model of Métis self-government in Canada, which has never been done before in academic research since self-government has only been studied in the context of First Nations and Inuit peoples.

Dr. Christopher Schneider

(Sociology)

• New Book: Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media
• Recipient, Early-in-Career Award (the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction)
• Public Visiting Scholar position in the Department of Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford
• Endowed Chair of Criminology and Criminal Justice position at St. Thomas University in Fredericton

Book Details: Dr. Schneider’s new book is one attempt to clarify how the logic of social media has been incorporated into policing practices in Canada. A goal of this book was to show how police practices increasingly include police performance on social media. The book illustrates how contemporary attempts to make sense of events have become much quicker and media-focused, especially those events at the intersection of social media and public police institutional activity. Policing and Social Media reached #1 on the Amazon Hot New Releases in Canadian Politics and has received extensive attention in news media following its publication in April 2016, including reviews in Maclean’s Magazine and the Vancouver Sun as well as dozens of radio and television interviews across Canada.

Dr. Schneider is the 2016 recipient of the Early-in-Career Award, awarded by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. He has received two invitations from other universities: he will hold the Public Visiting Scholar position in the Department of Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ont. He has also been invited to hold the Endowed Chair of Criminology and Criminal Justice position at St. Thomas University (STU) in Fredericton, N.B.

Dr. Deanna Smid

(English & Creative Writing)

• New Play: Macbeth: The After Party

Play Details: This play is a tongue-in-cheek play imagining the “after-party” following the first performance of Macbeth. While the actors struggle to describe their performance of the play, the unthinkable happens: their master of ceremonies falls over dead. Now the actors have another task: to determine which one of them killed Thomas Middleton. The play marries mystery with comedy, and pays homage to the author of “The Scottish Play.”

Dr. Demetres Tryphonopoulos

(English & Creative Writing)

• Recipient, Research Manitoba Bridge Funding Grant

Research Manitoba Award: Dr. Tryphonopoulos was awarded $10,000, for a project titled “H.D.’s Long Poems, 1942-1961: An Annotated Edition”. Project Description: Dr. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos has published so far two Annotated Scholarship Editions of H.D.’s prose (2008 and 2015). Supported by a 2016 Research Manitoba Tri-Council Bridge Funding program, “H.D.’s Long Poems, 1942-1961: An Annotated Edition” aims to make available to scholars but also the wider public this important American modernist writer’s late long poems (including Trilogy) in a definitive scholarly edition.

Dr. Emma Varley

(Anthropology)

• Wenner-Gren Post Ph.D. Research Grant (2017-2018)

Project Title: Occupied Health Systems: Medicine, Hospitals and Health Politics in Kashmir. Grant Details: USD $19,966.00, with Dr. Saiba Varma, Assistant Professor (Anthropology), University of California-San Diego. Project Description: The neutrality of medical professionals and health services is being compromised and politicized in conflict settings globally, with medicine becoming both a target and tactic of war. Against the backdrop of violent occupation in Indian and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, this project responds to an urgent need to understand state hospitals as political institutions, as spaces where fraught citizen-state relations play out in everyday clinical encounters and medical neglect and malpractice. Such harms are thereafter harnessed by diverse actors to galvanize political action and resistance, and to protest the state’s often failed goal of healing subjugated populations. By foregrounding Kashmir’s hospitals as sites from which to evaluate the political causes and significance of illness, injury and suffering, our ethnography examines how gaps and crises in medical infrastructures become intertwined with larger governance concerns, and to what effect.

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