2010 SSHRC Research Grants Support Diverse Arts Studies

Researchers in the Faculty of Arts are receiving close to $1.8 million from a national research grant agency to explore topics ranging from 19th century erotic dancers to a 25-year study on youth-adult transitions.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), which supports research excellence in the social sciences and humanities, awarded 20 Arts faculty members with grants that total $1,770,520. The annual funding offers a substantial contribution to help academics follow through with research initiatives that are often a very lengthy process.

"We started planning it in 1983 [and] got it off the ground in 1985, so this is the 25th anniversary study," explains sociology professor Harvey Krahn about his research that began with the study of youth unemployment resulting from the recession in the early 80s, and how it affected the research subjects' likelihood to succeed in their adult life.

Krahn has received $110,206 from SSHRC to continue his research, which has evolved into a follow-up with the 983 Edmonton high school seniors involved in the original study. Transitions To Adulthood: A 25 Year Follow-up of the Class of 1985 will examine the long-term effects of unemployment, post-secondary education, transition into adult roles, and mental health and family outcomes of individuals who are now in their mid to late-40s.

Krahn has now teamed up with psychology professor Nancy Galambos, who has research interests in transitions to adulthood, including gender roles in adolescence and the pattern of psychosocial maturity during that period.

"I would say it is a study on the experience of the transition to adulthood in the early 20s [and how it] actually affects their life in many ways up until midlife," says Galambos, who plans to find answers to a few key questions. "What are their careers situations like? What are their family situations like? And what's their mental health like at this point and can we actually see connections between what happened earlier on and what's happening now in their life?"

The grant will help Krahn and Galambos conduct a new round of surveys, with the help of the Population Research Laboratory, and recruit help from students to track down their subjects, who they have not had contact with in 11 years. Krahn notes that the evolution of technology within the 25 years he has managed this research has given way to new techniques to communicate with research subjects.

"When we started, we were using paper and pencil questionnaires, and then we moved into the telephone survey, and now web surveys and Facebook," says Krahn, adding that social media is a new technique that will be heavily relied upon to track down the class of 1985.

Art & Design assistant professor Amanda Boetzkes on the other hand, will rely on archival research along with critical theory, which includes visiting libraries, galleries, and exhibitions in order to conduct her research on Waste, Contemporary Art and the Aesthetics of Excess.

Boetzkes, who received $61,983 from SSHRC to investigate the use and representation of human garbage in contemporary art, will travel to New York, Washington, D.C. and Vancouver, in order to have access to the archived images that will help her unravel the growing trend of using garbage in various art forms. Boetzkes will also study waste management while visiting several landfills. She argues that the appearance of durable garbage in art is symptomatic of a drive to interrogate the current era of globalization through its patterns of consumption and waste.

"Artists are describing a paradigm shift related to this new materiality, showing it as a condition of the world while trying to critique it as well," says Boetzkes, referring specifically to the presence of non-decaying materials such as plastics that artists tend to utilize.

"They are trying to air our desire for these kinds of objects, and at the same time showing how that desire is ultimately destructive."

English and Film Studies associate professor Cecily Devereux is also using her SSHRC grant to help analyze the work of artists. However, her focus is on performing artists in the late 19th-century whose stories have been generally overlooked in history.

Empire's skin show: erotic dance and the performance of white femininity, 1868-1908 will map the movement of erotic dancers through imperial space and evaluate the implications of this performance and how we have come to understand white femininity within the context of empire.

Why do white female erotic dancers and sex workers outnumber white women in any other category in western films, yet there is a gap in the stories or writings in the archive of these women in empire?

"When you look through material from women writing about the British Empire in the 19th-century, you start to get a sense that there must be people missing, that there must be something that is not there, because there is remarkable sameness in the people that are writing that isn't indicative of what is going on in a particular space," says Devereux. She expects to find out how the history of these women may change the way we think about histories of women in Canada and influence the idea of gender and race.

The $67,000 Devereux received from SSHRC will help to gather the necessary information and map the route of these women who travelled within the British Empire.

"Going and finding stuff is key to a project like this because the repository materials on women who dance are few and scattered," says Devereux. She will visit erotic dance collections in Ohio, New York, San Francisco and the Yukon.

SSHRC was created by an act of Canada's Parliament in 1977 and is governed by a council that reports to Parliament through the Minister of Industry. More information on SSHRC funding and research initiatives can be found here.