Three faculty members at NSCAD University were awarded the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant. The SSHRC supports post-secondary-based research, research training and knowledge mobilization activities in the social sciences and humanities.
The recipients, Dr. Anton Lee, Dr. Nicole Lee, and Dr. Eddy Firmin were awarded a cumulative total of $209,992 for their respective research.
Dr. Anton Lee - Assistant Professor of Art History
Dr. Anton Lee’s work examines how photography has been used to shape the depictions and narrative of immigrants, specifically East Asian immigrants, in Halifax.
“Chinese immigrants began arriving in Halifax in the late 1880s and faced discrimination […] And in response, Chinese communities used cultural practices and photographs in particular—like studio portraits, ID photos, family snapshots—to help build cultural identities while challenging stereotypes,” Lee wrote in his research statement.
“However, scholarship on Chinese immigration has largely overlooked the importance of visual media in shaping diasporic identity, especially in Atlantic Canada.”
Research topic: Diasporic Camera and Photogenic Relations: The Visual Storytelling of East Asian Immigration in Halifax, 1880s-Present
Research summary: Diasporic Camera and Photogenic Relations explores the role of photography in shaping and expressing the experiences of East Asian immigrants in Halifax. The project will focus on Chinese Canadians’ visual histories, offering a case study of how photography has purposefully been used by diasporic communities to negotiate identity, build kinship, and foster a sense of belonging.
Grant funding: $75,000.00
Dr. Nicole Lee - Assistant Professor of Art Education
Dr. Nicole Lee’s work dives into the concept of performative productivity and how “meaningful work” can be a fuel for creativity.
“In an arts community, we are constantly looking at production as the only meritorious activity in the process of creation and innovation,” she says. “This SSHRC IDG project advances theorizations of meaningful work by studying the concept, role, and value of (in)activity in such a process. The research illuminates the conditions and kinds of nourishment needed for creation and innovation to be more sustainable and tenable.”
Research topic: A/r/tographic Curricular Uncommonplaces of Sustainable Relationality: Unsettling Lived Ratios of (In)Activity
Research summary: This research explores how art educators nourish themselves and remain resilient while caring for and attending to the ecosystems that enable human flourishing grounded in the arts. Through creative interventions, the project addresses the impacts of production-based measurements of human worth in advanced capitalism. This research tackles the prevalent problem of burnout and unwellness in higher education, and the urgent need to create more sustainable and relational learning, teaching, and scholarship models and environments.
Grant funding: $59,992.00
Dr. Eddy Firmin - NSCAD’s Canada Research Chair (Tier 2)
Dr. Eddy Firmin’s research is an extension of his previous work on Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art, which aims to build a local and international community of Black and African artists, students, researchers, critics and writers.
“In contemporary art, it has only been in the last 10 years or so that the Canadian and European art scenes have recognized the existence of a local scene of practitioners of African descent who have been unfairly excluded from art history […] Apart from a few rare art historians, these artists have never had the opportunity to develop their own research within the national academic art research agenda,” says Firmin.
“With this grant comes the opportunity to bring together minds of African descent from here and elsewhere to focus on the practice of these artists and their singularities.”
Research topic: The Rise Project
Research summary: The Rise project is a two-year audit of practices and theoretical reflections around Infungible Narratives by Afro-Canadian communities born of transatlantic racial slavery. That is, Afrodescendant narratives (ways of creating and expressing oneself visually) that have resisted the erasure programmed by the slave and colonial order. Within the field of Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community, the aim of this research is to question “the irreducible” at the heart of the resistance produced by Afro-Canadian communities born of transatlantic racial slavery.
Grant funding: $75,000.00
