SSHRC consultation raises many questions for researchers

By Barbara Black

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has embarked on a coast-to-coast consultation with its users to re-invent itself as a “knowledge council.”

However, even that term came in for close scrutiny at consultation meetings held at Concordia and McGill Universities.

SSHRC director Marc Renaud, who attended the meeting at McGill on March 31, explained that the federal granting agency wants to intensify and organize its support for researchers, and communicate more effectively with the public.

The meeting held at Concordia on March 25 was attended by about 20 people, about half of them from the Faculty of Fine Arts.

Artists were only recently admitted to the ranks of SSHRC recipients, and have been making strong representations for their creative work as scholarly research. As one artist said, “We don’t answer questions, we ask questions in interesting ways.”

It was evident that some researchers, particularly humanities and arts scholars, mistrust the political language of SSHRC’s consultation document. Some of these scholars reject the scientific model altogether, and feel they have little in common with the social scientists.

There are those who favour individual or small-team projects, and those who think the future lies in large teams or consortiums of researchers. However, at the McGill meeting, which was well attended by Concordians, Renaud said that SSHRC found such large teams difficult to manage.

Asked by SSHRC to discuss better electronic links across Canada, some people seemed uninterested in technology; others felt that linking Canadian researchers is inadequate in the context of global research. Two Concordia music scholars welcomed the latest forms of digital contact, and looked forward to real-time electronic conferences.

Professor Vered Amit, the SSHRC representative at Concordia, described its challenges.

“By comparison to the funding made available for the natural and medical sciences, social sciences and humanities research in Canada has historically received a relatively small fraction. While the funding available to all the granting councils has been increased over the last few years, this imbalance has not changed.

“As universities (and Concordia University especially) have begun to hire many junior faculty members to replace retiring professors, the demand on all the granting councils has increased accordingly.

“One of the results of this situation has been that SSHRC has not been able to fund all the research projects that its own evaluating juries have recommended for funding. SSHRC is currently funding only about 40 per cent of the applications received for its standard research grants program, even though its juries are recommending about 60-65 per cent of applications for funding.

“The rate of success among applications to the standard research grant program of SSHRC is nearly half that available to NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

“With retirements across the country expected to increase over the next 10 years and hiring of junior faculty to pick up even greater pace accordingly, SSHRC expects that the demand for funding will only increase in the future, putting even greater pressure on its resources.”

Amit said that one of the key issues is whether SSHRC should be changing the nature and range of activities it supports in order to make its research more attractive to the taxpayers and the government. “Should it focus more on the kind of policy-oriented research likely to appeal to the politicians and policy-makers funding SSHRC?”

On one subject, these scholars were united: they all agree that they need better public relations skills.

“Should SSHRC change the range of activities it conducts, focusing more on dissemination and networking in an effort to increase the visibility and impact of social sciences and humanities research?”

Arriving at a consensus about the answers to these questions will be difficult, Amit said, and the time frame is narrow.

“While this is an extremely busy time of the year, getting a sense of the views of our faculty members and graduate students on these issues is crucial.”

She and Dr. Vo-Van welcome your views, by e-mail or at johnmolson.concordia.ca.