SSHRC provides $1 million for 11 projects

Dalhousie earned the most research grants of any Atlantic Canadian university in the most recent round of funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Through an investment of $1,026,322, SSHRC will support 11 new projects based at Dalhousie involving 17 faculty researchers.

Dr. Carl Breckenridge, Dalhousie's Vice President, Research, welcomed the announcement. "This funding will not only support Dalhousie faculty as they research a range of meaningful social, political and cultural issues, but will also provide valuable training opportunities for graduate students as they prepare for careers in research, and in public, private and not-for-profit sectors." The funded projects will examine everything from electronic French language dictionaries and the economic vulnerability of Canadian children to the role of the salon in post-revolutionary France.

For example, Dr. HŽlne Deacon of the Department of Psychology will study children's ability to understand roots and suffixes in words, to enhance early reading, writing and comprehension skills. Her project is titled "The origins and extent of young children's knowledge of morphological conventions in reading and writing."

"Knowing the root of a complicated word can help kids in spelling words, and learning what they mean. To date, this has been really under-studied in children," says Dr. Deacon. "We're trying to figure out what children do understand, when they begin to understand it, and what the barriers are to that understanding."

A project to be carried out by members of Dalhousie's Marine and Environmental Law Institute, "Strengthening Canada's regional fisheries management arrangements in light of sustainability principles," will benefit the long-term health of fisheries in Canada and around the globe.

Institute director Dr. Moira McConnell explains, "This project will develop law and policy recommendations to strengthen future trans-boundary fisheries governance, and will provide inputs to international discussions on ways to address over-fishing on the high seas."

Dr. Catrina Brown of the School of Social Work and Dr. Sherry Stewart of the Department of Psychology will undertake a project called, "Challenging dominant addiction discourse: making harm reduction work for women with alcohol use problems." Their goal is to uncover underlying assumptions about addictions, and to ask how these are either challenged or reinforced by people who provide treatment services and by women who are accessing treatment for alcohol problems.

"This study aims to advance knowledge on harm reduction," says Brown. "It also aims to develop health education materials to support informed decision-making, and enhance the development and delivery of harm reduction services, and subsequently, reduce the harmful consequences to women's health associated with problem alcohol use."

Other Dalhousie projects include:

• Peter Aucoin, Governance and accountability for arm's length agencies: Canada in comparative perspective.
• Roberta Barker, Cultural drag: gendered negotiations in Shakespearean performance.
• Catrina Brown and Sherry Stewart, Challenging dominant addiction discourse: making harm reduction work for women with alcohol use problems.
• HŽlne Deacon, The origins and extent of young children's knowledge of morphological conventions in reading and writing.
• Leonard Diepeveen, Dubious modernism: fraud discourse in modernist culture.
• Marie-JosŽe Hamel and Jasmina Milicevic, Dire autrement: vers un dictionnaire Žlectronique de reformulation pour apprenants du franais langue seconde.
• Raymond Klein and Bryan Maycock (NSCAD University), Patterns of looking when drawing from observation: implications in training.
• Cynthia Neville, Studies in the social and legal history of medieval Scotland, 1100-1400.
• Jolanta Pekacz, Memory at work: the invention of the salon in post-revolutionary France.
• Shelley Phipps and Peter Burton, The economic vulnerability of Canadian children: time and money in historical and longitudinal perspective.
• David VanderZwaag, Moira McConnell, Dawn Russell, Phillip Saunders, Theodore McDorman (University of Victoria) and Donald McRae(University of Ottawa), Strengthening Canada's regional fisheries management arrangements in light of sustainability principles.