The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) recently announced that NSCAD University’s Dr. April Mandrona, Assistant Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture and Director of Art Education, was awarded a Partnership Development Grant in the sum of $199,999. April is the principal investigator and therefore has primary responsibility for the overall direction of the research and its related activities.
The research, titled Storying Transnational Knowledges: Connection through Narrative, aims to address the potential of multimodal storytelling (e.g. written and spoken language, visual, audio, etc.) and network building for the well-being and cultural “survivance” of newcomer young people and their communities in Canada and Australia. This research will be explored across four locations: Halifax, Nova Scotia; Montreal, Quebec; Darwin, Northern Territory; and Adelaide, South Australia. Each site will engage 15-20 young people and five adult knowledge keepers. This new partnership involves NSCAD University, McGill University, Charles Darwin University, the University of South Australia, Byenvini à Montréal, and the Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia.
Partnership Development Grants provide support to foster new research and/or related activities with new or existing partners; and to design and test new partnership approaches for research and/or related activities. The grants are valued at $75,000 to $200,000, over one to three years. The program purpose is to provide funding to enable social sciences and humanities research collaboration with partners across the academic, public, private and not-for-profit sectors. This program helps stimulate leading-edge, internationally competitive research, fosters strong and productive research collaborations with multisectoral partners and accelerates the use of research results by organizations that can harness them for Canadian economic, social and cultural development.
Please join us in congratulating April! We look forward to seeing this research develop and the connections and stories that unfold through this important work.