More than $1 million goes to grad students

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has awarded $1,140,224 in research funding to graduate students, many of them master’s students at Concordia.

The windfall is part of a new program called Canada Graduate Scholarships. Across Canada, $51 million was awarded to 800 master’s students, 600 doctoral students and 135 postdoctoral fellows. Here are just three examples from the 35 awarded to Concordia grad students.

Ngan Trinh is a Communications Studies master’s student who is doing a study on teens and transcultural consumption in Vietnam. SSHRC found her project so interesting that she was singled out for mention in the agency’s news release as one of the first recipients under the CGS program.

Linda M. Darwish is the fourth year of her doctoral studies in the Department of Religion. Holder of a scholarship from the Quebec agency FQRSC, she has now received a CGS doctoral fellowship of $19,000 for “The Ayatollahs speak: Shi’ite fatwas on Muslim-other relations.”

Matthew C. Hayday is doing a a study called “Canada Day celebrations and the construction of national identity, 1958-1985” under the supervision of Professor Ronald Rudin. He got a postdoctoral fellowship of $70,056.

Natalie S. Kallio got a grant of $17,500 to do a study called “(re)framing Concordia.” It’s about how the media treated the political controversy at the university last year, something she found both frustrating and depressing.

The reference to framing comes from communications theorists, who say we create frames around subjects that shape discourse on those subjects.

In this case, Kallio felt that the frame of “free speech” bent discussion of the actual events out of shape. News reports fell back on Concordia’s “history of violence,” linking three unrelated incidents over 34 years, and used incendiary phrases like “campus in conflict.”

She tried her idea out at the Learneds in Halifax last spring, and got so much encouragement from the other social scientists around her that she wrote her SSHRC application as soon as she got back to Montreal.

“I’m not taking a side,” said the second-year master’s student, who did an Honours English degree at the University of Saskatchewan before coming here last year. “And I’m wondering what frame I’m going to be slotted into.”

To see the full list of Concordia recipients, check out the SSHRC Web site at http://www.sshrc.ca/web/winning/comp_results/2003_cgs_docs, and look for pages 83 to 85 of the results.