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Projects with major social impact receive $5.49 million

SSHRC Partnership Grants allow Concordia University professors to investigate aging in a digital world, and strengthen the voices of rural communities

Montreal, August 28, 2014  — Two Concordia University professors have received a total of $5.49 million in federal funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council as the lead researchers of two multi-institutional international research projects The grants come from the Partnership Grants initiative, which helps advance knowledge and understanding on critical issues of intellectual, social, economic and cultural significance.

Ageing, Communication, Technologies: Experiencing a Digital World in Later Life

Kim Sawchuk, professor in Concordia’s Department of Communication Studies and a director of the department’s Mobile Media Lab, has received a grant of $2.99 million. Her seven-year project, Ageing, Communication, Technologies (ACT): Experiencing a Digital World in Later Life, is the first large-scale initiative of its kind to address the transformation of the experiences of aging in networked societies.

ACT brings together 12 universities, seven research institutes, seven community partners, 17 co-applicants and 18 collaborators. With the international research team behind ACT, Sawchuk hopes to transform public discourse about aging while including older adults as active agents and collaborators in the research agenda. ACT will develop curricula and provide a lasting collaborative platform for the critical analysis of the relationship between aging and digital worlds.

Rural Policy Learning Commons

William Reimer, professor emeritus in Concordia’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology and adjunct professor at Brandon University (BU), has received a partnership grant of $2.5 million from SSHRC. Rural Policy Learning Commons (RPLC), a seven-year research project based at BU, will help make policy-makers more conscious of the unique characteristics, benefits and challenges associated with rural and northern communities.

With funding from more than a dozen partners alongside SSHRC, RPLC is an international project with a total of $5.2 million in funding, meant to strengthen the voices of rural and northern populations. It brings together an existing global network of 90 institutional and individual participants, which will grow significantly as the partnership expands to include more countries, regions, and communities.

Learn more about these two Partnership Grants here



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