KIAS Director Geoffrey Rockwell, photo Oleksandr Pankieiev
A fast-paced afternoon of presentations at the Celebration of Research event on Monday concluded with the announcement of the 2017Kule Research Cluster Grant recipients, which support the activities of interdisciplinary research teams in the social sciences, humanities and fine arts. Four projects across three faculties received funding, with the majority of recipients coming from the Faculty of Arts.
The researchers, along with Peter and Doris Kule, benefactors of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS); Lesley Cormack, Dean of Arts; Steve Patten, Associate Dean (Research); Lorne Babiuk, Vice-President (Research); Rod Loyola, MLA Edmonton-Ellerslie and Geoffrey Rockwell, Director of KIAS were on hand for the announcement.
Rockwell says that, while the crop of proposals this year were excellent, they were able to find ways to support "a breadth of projects" that show the promise of social science, fine arts and humanities research at the University of Alberta. "The important thing," he says, "is to foster collaborative and interdisciplinary research in a way that advances knowledge and promotes the public good."
Adam Gaudry, who is cross-appointed with the Department of Political Science and the Faculty of Native Studies, has received a Kule Cluster Grant for his project, Land-based learning in Teetl'it Zheh: A University-First Nation Bush Camp Partnership. It promises to be a truly collaborative effort; connecting community knowledge holders and university researchers in the exploration of Gwich'in land-based knowledge skills and governance processes.
Four Arts researchers have received funding for their interdisciplinary project, Building Research at the Intersections of Gender, which "recognizes, consolidates and mobilizes the breadth and wealth of research strength in gender-related intersectional projects" at the University of Alberta. In this cross-faculty initiative,Susanne Luhmann (Women's and Gender Studies),Sara Dorow (Sociology),Lois Harder (Political Science) andNat Hurley (English & Film Studies) are aiming to formalize and expand this collective research capacity into a signature area of excellence.
EthnomusicologistMichael Frishkopf has also received a Kule Cluster Grant for his proposal, Deep Learning for Sound Recognition. "Leveraging the breadth of expertise at the University of Alberta in sound studies and machine learning," the goal of this project is to develop algorithms capable of automatically annotating audio recordings. This has the potential to revolutionize disciplines that depend on searching, indexing, classifying and analyzing audio collections, such as ethnomusicology, linguistics and bioacoustics.
Lastly,Leith Deacon, associate professor with the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has received funding for his project Boom/Bust in Canada: Tempering Canadian Experiences of Resource Dependency, where he is examining the concept of resiliency within the context of resource-based communities.
For more information on the latest cluster grant recipients, visit theKIAS research project page.
Read more about the 2017 Celebration of Research: Exploring Intersectionshere.