Canada Research Chair in Religious Diversity and Social Change

In today’s complex world, how can the religious and the nonreligious live well together? This is the primary question that Dr. Lori G. Beaman, Canada Research Chair in Religious Diversity and Social Change, is exploring.

Societies are grappling with a combination of increased religious diversity, a renewed presence of religion in the public sphere, and growing numbers of people who describe themselves as having no religion. Dr. Beaman’s research examines how the increase in those identifying as nonreligious is changing the religious landscape. The potential impact of this shift is profound, yet the contours of it have yet to be fully explored.

Dr. Beaman’s work examines issues that are deeply important to policy makers—in fields from education to health to law—who are seeking ways of responding to this new “normal” and the conflict it engenders. Given Canada’s history of global leadership on human rights, multiculturalism and diversity, it is well positioned to develop strategies to support a complex future that includes both diverse religious and nonreligious populations.

Understanding the range of interactions between these groups by mapping sites of conflict and negotiation is one task of this programme of research. Another is to discover how differences are negotiated or conflict is intensified. Ultimately, this research will identify non-conflictual approaches to diversities across the religion/nonreligion spectrum.

In the age of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” scholars, politicians, policy-makers, educators, students and citizens need access to authoritative information and its historical contexts. But the “connective tissue” that Web users need in order to synthesize the immense amounts of authoritative data is missing. This connective tissue is linked data—a method of publishing structured data so it can be interlinked and become more useful.

The economic, health, social and even defense benefits of access to peer-reviewed, authoritative data are well established. But there is a shortage of humanities data available online in linked-data format. Currently, linked data only make up one percent of the Web. That means whether they know it or not, users do not have access to the full knowledge-generating power that the Web is designed to support.

Dr. Constance Crompton, Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities, aims to change this situation by giving Web users access to the ”superpowers of the humanities”: a better ability to understand the past in order to improve the future.

Crompton, her research team and colleagues are converting vast amounts of peer-reviewed, authoritative, open-access digital humanities content into linked data—and creating models of the past to inform expectations about the future. The authoritative information they generate will be served alongside its historical context to help both human readers and computers infer appropriate solutions from the data. Ultimately, this research will break down data silos to help turn Web users into humanities superheroes.

Canada Research Chair in Environment, Society and Policy

The world is experiencing unprecedented socio-environmental problems. Climate and social change, political reform and large-scale development have led to rapidly changing global conditions. This has made it critically important to identify, define and effectively govern the complex interdependencies that exist between humans and the natural environment. 

Dr. Jackie Dawson, Canada Research Chair in Environment, Society and Policy, is examining resilience in communities where environmental change has resulted in the restructuring and transformation of local economies. Dr. Dawson is focusing on communities that are seeing their economies ruined by changing environmental conditions and on communities that are witnessing new economic opportunities due to the changing environment. 

Communities in Canada and around the world that rely on vulnerable environmental resources have long been prone to boom or bust economic cycles. These cycles are even more prevalent in today’s era of rapid economic development and globalization. That has made it more important than ever for communities to weigh the pros and cons of development and pay close attention to resilience, adaptation and related economic policy.

Dr. Dawson’s research will increase knowledge and reduce the environmental and public safety risks associated with changing environmental and socio-economic conditions in communities.

University Research Chair in Digital Scholarship

Today, computer technology is familiar in historical scholarship across the country, and has become a critical tool for profound conceptual and methodological rethinking of the history of Canada. At each stage of this remarkable transformation, Chad Gaffield, Professor, Department of History, University of Ottawa, has played a key role. By introducing new concepts such as “automated archivist” and by promoting a collaboration of “machines and minds”, Professor Gaffield has, in a unique manner, been at the forefront of the scholarly development of computer-based applications. His latest success is as Principal Investigator for the Canada Century Research Infrastructure project, one of the largest projects ever funded for historical research in Canada. This project exemplifies all the distinctive elements of his innovative leadership: active engagement in both the anglophone and francophone communities; interdisciplinary participation; and pan-Canadian and international collaboration. As a consequence, Chad Gaffield is one of the most well-known and highly-respected scholars across the social sciences and humanities in Canada. With his pioneering conceptual and methodological work, as well as his award-winning studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Gaffield has made, and continues to make, outstanding contributions to the furthering of knowledge of Canadian history.

Franco-Ontarian communities and immigration: vitality, transformation and diversification

In light of political and community priorities accorded to Francophone immigration as a means of ensuring the vitality of Franco-Ontarian communities, it is essential to understand how established members of these communities perceive and experience the arrival of new and diverse populations. My research program will contribute to the advancement of empirical and conceptual knowledge on Franco-Ontarian communities by documenting socio-spatial dynamics and interactions between cultural groups in the unique context of these Francophone communities. The results will be used to develop recommendations for public policy and community practices that meet the needs of local Francophone communities.

Chaire Gordon F. Henderson sur les droits de la personne

How might an analysis of the histories of refugee and asylum seeking, and of the laws and protocols regulating these processes, enhance our understanding of the asylum-refugee-migration nexus of our time? During my time as Gordon F. Henderson Chair of Human Rights, I plan to work in collaboration with researchers, students and activists to examine the history of international refugee law and the innovative ways that government officials, jurists, activists, and displaced populations have put it to use since its interwar origins.  The project titled Bursting at the Seams of International Refugee Law: Displacement, Statelessness and Asylum Seeking, Past and Present will assess past failures and successes of refugee law in order to contribute to a historically researched and empirically grounded revision of international political asylum and refugee protocols.

OLBI University Chair in New Technologies and Computer Assisted Language Learning

Marie-Josée Hamel holds the OLBI research Chair in New Technologies and Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) since July 2012. Dr. Hamel is interested by Learner-Computer-Interaction (LCI) in the context of language learning and educational ergonomics. She seeks to describe and model how teachers design and deliver technology-mediated language tasks and what learners do when performing such learning tasks online. She studies in particular the efficiency of learners’ interaction with language resources, such as electronic dictionaries, translators and grammar checkers, during these tasks. Her aim is to shed light on LCI processes so to optimize teaching (and training) interventions as well as learning strategies and outcome in online/hybrid language learning environments.

OLBI Research Chair in the Management of Languages

Dr. Sylvie Lamoureux, associate professor of bilingualism studies and second-language teaching in the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute, holds the Research Chair in the Management of Languages (2017-2022). Her research focuses on the management of Canada’s official languages, factors which influence French-speakers in a minority context, and questions of student access, experience, and success. Dr. Lamoureux has a been extremely successful in attaining external funding, and in 2015 she was named to the Order of Ontario and the Royal Society of Canada’s prestigious College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, in addition to winning the Faculty of Arts Emerging Researcher Award.