By the numbers in federal funding for social sciences and humanities scholarship
The nearly $270K in funding Farah Schwartzman received is for her respective projects that examine justice and racial hierarchies in the Americas: “Bringing democracy into the law: Urban inequalities and struggles over rights and fairness in the Brazilian Justice System” (IG), and “Centering Indigenous, African and Afro-American and South Atlantic political institutions: toward a new historical sociology of the emergence of racial hierarchies in the Americas” (IDG).
“The Insight Development Grant will allow me to build on my previous work in understanding the origins of racial hierarchies and social relationships but from a more historical sociology perspective,” says Farah Schwartzman, an associate prof in UTM’s Department of Sociology.
“In this project, I will also be able to delve deeper into the relationship between colonialism, slavery, and the making of modern political and economic institutions.”
For her Insight Grant, she will study the power structures, workings of the law, and the struggles over justice in São Paula, Brazil, with a focus on particular cases that includes teenage girls and their families, legal professionals and public defense lawyers, and feminist social movements.
Farah Schwartzman says that her project will bridge scholarship in sociology, law and urban studies, and will contribute to a broader discussion on the relationship of citizenship, democracy, inequality, and the law. She is working closely with collaborators Mariana Mota Prado, professor at UofT’s Faculty of Law, and Gislene Aparecida dos Santos, an associate professor based at the University of São Paula, as well as graduate students Natalia Otto, Roberta Pamplona, and Eduardo Cornellius, who have all been integral to the shaping of the study so far.
Both of her projects will help to fund student salaries and fieldwork abroad, as well as conference-related expenses.
Along with Farah Schwartzman, the following UTM researchers also received Insight Grants for their respective projects:
Department of Economics
- Carolina Arteaga, The Effect of Improving Access to Justice for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence
- Gueorgui Kambourov, Firms, Frictions, and Economic Growth
Department of Historical Studies
- Christoph Emmrich, Glossaries for the Gods and Other Users: The Religious Genealogy of the Newar Bilingual Dictionary
- J. Barton Scott, The Global Blasphemer
Department of Language Studies
- Pascal Michelucci, Politiques du genre et engagement dans la littérature française de l'extrême contemporain
Department of Management
- Lisa Kramer, Human Behaviour and Financial Market Liquidity
Department of Philosophy
- James Allen, Aristotle's Invention of Logic
Department of Psychology
- Erika Carlson, Is self-knowledge a trait?
- Samuel Ronfard, But why? Development and individual differences in young children's ability to ask informative questions
And along with Farah Schwartzman on the IDG front, the following UTM researchers also received Insight Development Grants for their two-year projects:
Department of Anthropology
- Steven Dorland, Learning about Learning through the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation: A community-based approach to social learning and pottery making
Department of Economics
- Sebastian Dyrda, Business Tax Competitiveness: Canada vs. United States
Department of Language Studies
- Avery Ozburn, Vowels in East African languages
Department of Management
- Camille Hebert, Board Diversity Quotas and the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
Department of Political Science
- Andrea Olive, Bison as Reconciliation on the Northern Great Plains
Department of Psychology
- Elizabeth Johnson, Examining the developmental roots of language-based social biases
Department of Sociology
- Chris Smith, Vice for Sale: Neighbourhood Change and Illicit Markets
Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology
- Marie-Pier Boucher, Outer Space & the City: Co-Habitation Strategies with Interplanetary Infrastructures
Additionally, on the Partnership-portfolio front: Professor Tenley Conway (Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment) was awarded over $190K for a Partnership Development Grant for her project, Urban-nature partnership to study the social impacts of tree loss; and Professor Weiguo Zhang (Department of Sociology) was awarded $25K for a Partnership Engage Grant for his project, Promoting volunteerism in Chinese communities in the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 eras.
“We are absolutely inspired and grateful for this funding boost for our researchers from SSHRC,” says Elspeth Brown, associate vice-principal, research at UTM.
“Particularly in these times when there have been such seismic shifts in the research landscape and funding can be scarce, it is wonderful to see the support, but also that the scholars on our campus are still being productive and creative with their projects to work around any obstacles they might be currently facing.”
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada annually runs the IG and IDG competitions in October and February, with the Insight Grant supports research excellence for longer term initiatives in the social sciences and humanities, while the Insight Development Grant is intended for research in its initial stages. See all the funded projects for SSHRC’s recent competitions.
This year, Brown in UTM’s Office of the Vice-Principal, Research (OVPR) spearheaded the SSHRC Grant-Writing Cohort Program for faculty members who are writing their SSHRC applications for the upcoming competitions. The intention of this initiative is to match up applicants so they work on their grants sooner, but also to have a buddy system to work through sections of the application and bounce ideas off of, and to foster more of a sense of community among UTM researchers. Twenty-eight UTM faculty members have signed on for the pilot program, and with such impressive uptake the OVPR program will likely run for years to come.
See the OVPR website for details and get in touch with Carla DeMarco if you would like to join next year’s cohort or if you are applying for an Insight Development Grant in the February 2022 competition. There is an upcoming information session on December 7 at 10 am for the IDG run by Mark Bold from UofT's Research Services Office. See details and registration information.