Impressive number of CSSH scholars seek Insight Grants

A large number of University of Alberta faculty members are applying to this year’s Insight Grant competition.

53 applications for the federally funded program came from the U of A compared to 45 last year. A majority of these came from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH), with 35 proposals submitted from our four faculties.

“Insight Grants are the standard research grant offered annually by SSHRC to support disciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-sector work throughout the arts, humanities and social sciences. Regardless of the size of the grant, faculty members put in a lot of work to prepare a successful application. We are very grateful for that work, often undertaken by faculty in the summer months, which helps fund important field research and archival work, as well as training opportunities and part-time jobs for students across the college,” says Joanna Harrington, who serves as the CSSH associate dean research.

“We also appreciate the many faculty members who later become peer reviewers and mentors for future faculty applicants. The next competition round will be September 2024 and the CSSH Office of Research has supports in place, including a video library, internal peer review and grant editing assistance, with faculty applicants advised to contact their research partner.”

The federally funded grant aims to support social sciences and humanities work, and can provide grants of between $7,000 and $400,000 for both new and established scholars. The results of the application process will be announced in April next year.

Exemplary research topics

The proposals submitted by CSSH scholars address a large range of research topics.

Dr. Rebeca Macias Gimenez, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law, is seeking funding to study Indigenous jurisdiction for environmental decision-making in historic treaty lands. She is using Treaty 8, which spans parts of Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and Saskatchewan, as a case study.

Treaties like Treaty 8 provided Indigenous Peoples the rights to use the land in the ways they did in the past. But today, many approvals of industrial development projects have been made without thinking about how environmental impacts accumulate and affect Indigenous communities, she says.

“There’s so much impact from those developments, and they combine over time in a way that leaves Indigenous peoples very little space to practice their treaty rights,” Gimenez says.

Her research would analyze one notable case involving the Blueberry River First Nation, and its implications on resource decision-making on Treaty 8 land. Beyond that, her work also aims to analyze how this case and Indigenous-led frameworks from B.C. could be applied to Alberta in the future.

Meanwhile, research proposed by Dr. Natalie Van Deusen, a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, and the holder of the Henry Cabot and Linnea Lodge Scandinavian Professorship, is focused on a place farther away and in a time much longer ago.

A specialist in medieval Icelandic literature, Van Deusen’s proposal is about research into St. Helena. St. Helena was an important figure in medieval Christianity, and is credited with finding the cross on which Jesus was crucified and returning it to Rome.

The saint or themes linked with her appear in many different sources, she says. These include parts of the Sagas of Icelanders — which mostly come from the 13th and 14th centuries — and poetry from the medieval period.

Van Deusen hopes to explore themes of motherhood, piety and pilgrimage, which were often tied to St. Helena, in the Old Norse texts. “There’s a number of Queens and noble women who can be argued to reflect her kind of character archetype,” she says.

Van Deusen is seeking funding to Iceland and Denmark to dig deep into primary — and ancient — text. At the end of the research, she hopes to have produced a book, a themed issue in an academic journal and even a symposium at the U of A which looks more broadly at the concepts of gender and sanctity in the Nordic countries in the Middle Ages.

These examples offer a glimpse into the diverse range of research topics submitted for this year's competition. The CSSH Office of Research extends its best wishes to all applicants and commends each one for their hard work put into bringing these proposals to fruition.