Marc Brunelle: Revisiting tonogenesis in Vietnamese and its sister languages: implications for theories of sound change
The goal of this project is to conduct phonetic studies of six languages, chosen because they are under-described and represent the various branches of the Vietic family (Vietnamese and its sister languages), and to use this evidence to reevaluate Haudricourt’s standard model. Besides the Vietic evidence, new techniques that produce much finer-grained phonetic data than currently available will be used to refine the model. The project will also treat variation across individual speakers in ways that align with current models of sound change that do not assume a simple succession of static and discrete language stages.
Elizabeth Dubois: The roles and impacts of political social media influencers
Online influencers are a new type of political actor in our media ecosystem: they are adept at building and maintaining audiences on social media platforms and play increasingly important political roles. However, it is unclear who exactly counts as an influencer, what impact they can have, and how they should be treated in the context of electoral law and regulation. In this research, we map the political influencer ecosystem to understand relationships between influencers and political actors such as politicians, journalists, marketing agencies and technology companies. In doing so, we will create an international database of existing regulations and policies that address the uses of political influencers in national elections. We also dive deep into the roles and impacts of influencers in the 2025 Canadian federal election to shed light on current practices in order to develop and update theories of personal influence and opinion leadership. Using insights from this investigation and parallel studies conducted by collaborators in other countries, our approach will feature categorization to specifically address political influencers, rather than an approach that broadly applies to commercial influencers.
Ivan Ivanov: Enhancing cybercrime responses in the digital era: The critical role of communication in crisis management
Cybercrime has emerged as one of the most pressing global threats to both society and organizations. The social, human and financial repercussions of cybercrime are substantial, leading to consequences that are not only alarming, but also difficult to effectively address. In response, this project centres on the examination of crises triggered by cyberattacks at both national and international levels, with a particular emphasis on security breaches and ransomware attacks targeting critical infrastructures such as hospitals, airports and government institutions. By investigating these incidents, the project aims to enhance our understanding of crisis management in the context of cyber threats, ultimately contributing to more effective responses.
Jinny Yu: Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex: Towards decolonizing Canadian art history
The Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex is a research project that is part knowledge creation, part advocacy, part knowledge dissemination and part digital humanities. The primary focus of this project is to address the fundamental structures that have resulted in the exclusion of BIPOC artists from art history discourses produced by museums, universities and the publishing industry. The project not only seeks to increase representation, but also proposes new methodologies for collaborative research and writing in order to decolonize art historical and digital humanities methodologies. A secondary outcome of this project will be to build a database that applies this research and new methodologies to create a repository of BIPOC artists in Canada, which significantly contribute to knowledge and dissemination of these hidden and excluded histories. In doing so, the Rolodex seeks to create the conditions for contemporary Canadian art histories that more accurately represent and reflect the complex realities and identities of Canada in the 21st century.
Lori Burns: Sharing sonic spaces: Intersecting co-subjectivities in popular music song collaborations
This project will examine song collaborations across popular music genres by investigating the industry contexts and interpreting the performance expression of the collaborating artists within the multimodal (sonic-lyrical-visual) space. By analyzing selected recordings and video performances, the research will illustrate each performer’s role in the musical structure of selected works and interpret the elements that shape their expression. Within collaborative songs, artists negotiate identity and hegemonic power; a closer examination of this shared sonic space must be critiqued in order to move beyond a reductive and objectified view of vocalists in genre-based musical expression.
Meredith Terretta: Between the bench, the bar and the academy: The socio-historical construction of law in Africa from the imperial to the global age
This research will assess whether law has played an emancipatory or assimilative role since the transitions to statehood of African territories formerly under British and French administration. Our empirical findings will make visible the imperial content of legal systems imbricating African and European states to enable understanding of how racialized and gendered hierarchies rooted in colonial law persist beyond the formal decolonization of empires. On the basis of these findings, our project will contribute knowledge of how the law has been socio-historically constructed in Africa over the past century, not only in the domestic sphere, but also in African states’ economic and political engagement in international law and global capitalism.
Anne Vallely: Cultivating nonviolence: Jain introspective practices and the ethics of cognitive flexibility
Although Jainism is less globally recognized than its counterparts (Hinduism and Buddhism), its influence on Indian philosophy, ethics, literature, art and commerce over the past three millennia has been immense, which is especially remarkable given the small size of this community of five-to-six million. Jains attribute their disproportionate success to their unwavering commitment to the principle and practice of absolute non-violence (Ahimsa), dedicating more attention to its analysis and cultivation than any other known tradition. In Jainism, Ahimsa is not merely a passive avoidance of harm but an active, ideologically driven pursuit involving rigorous self-discipline and structured introspective practices. This project aims to advance the study of Jain introspective practices by examining their role and significance across Jainism’s major sectarian divisions, while exploring the connection between these practices and self-reported ethical behaviours.
Jakub Zdebik: AI and the mutation of the “artificial” in contemporary art images
Artist involvement with artificial intelligence, and its entanglements of technology and capitalism, is redefining creativity and, by the same token, humanizing AI for the benefit of corporations. There is a lack of research on how art historical concepts have impacted the perimeters along which AI art functions, and on how these artistic categories have accelerated to such a degree as to feed AI art with a mutated aesthetic sense through speed, proliferation and circumnavigation of artistic principles of appropriation and copyright. The aim of this research is to categorize the ways AI interacts with art in order to better understand the current state of affairs by making an art historical survey of how art has combined with technologies for over one hundred years.
Suzy Ahn: Developing a Canadian French articulatory corpus to explore the relationship between articulation and acoustics
This project aims to enhance our understanding of the relationship between articulation and acoustics through extensive speech data, encompassing both articulatory and acoustic elements. It will investigate how ultrasound tongue imaging data of Canadian French vowels aligns with their acoustic realizations, comparing results among native speakers and non-native speakers of varying proficiency levels.
Lucie Hotte: La littérature franco-canadienne en revues (1968-2024)
This project seeks to better understand the role in the Franco-Ontarian literary ecosystem of scholarly journals focused on literature, so as to grasp how they have contributed to legitimizing the Acadian, Franco-Ontarian and Franco-Western bodies of work. It will look at which journals publish Franco-Ontarian literary criticism, to determine their influence in forging the reputations of certain authors and identify the epistemological premises influencing the studies that are published. The project will look at 12 Franco-Ontarian scholarly journals published between 1968 and 2024. Coming from the three large francophone regions in Canada, the journals show, by publishing both articles and criticism, the growth of Franco-Canadian literature and of academic research. The project will measure the weight given to each type of literature and how it relates to the others within these journals, as well as assess the links among the different actors and contributors associated with each journal.
Anne-Marie Ouellet: Du paysage au théâtre : étude et mise à l’épreuve de procédés permettant de valoriser l’agentivité de matérialités dites naturelles dans la création théâtrale
This creative research project will study an area of contemporary theatrical work that moves away from dramatic narrative in favour of a dramaturgy of sensation. We will focus on the behaviour of water in two states: liquid and vapour. Selected for their strong agency and performative and poetic potential, water and fog will become the central materialities of our dramaturgic creations. Rooted in the concrete, this research will enable the renewal of the language of the stage by serving materialities, presumably non-artistic, and giving life to the “politics of interdependence” (Morizot, 2020) central to art and existence.