Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

So that's what academically we've done.

We've got SSHRC, wonderful funding from the federal government.

We also were supported by the Cool Institute for Advanced Studies, and we have bundled this funding to build this international partnership.

We have partners from United States, Harvard University, our very talented team of, uh, digital humanities folk who know how to work technically with all these works is housed in the University of Western Bohemia.

It's a big amount of work to try to get through.

So then we ended up applying for a grant from the SSHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, to hire some students.

We had one Indigenous student and one settler student working who took what I was doing, but to the next level, they brought video cameras and they videoed the translators saying the lines, and then they had subtitles in English and in the indigenous languages.

So that is a database that still exists and will exist for anybody that wants to, well, we used it in the show, but, So we had the translators on hand.

I think this is a trend not only in Sweden, but in other places as well that, you know, higher education institutions, research funding agencies are now also being activated in and around defense research and defense related development and innovation.

So one program, for instance, is from Nordforsk, which is a Nordic corporation, together with the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for seed money and for research in certain areas.

So that, I think, will increase because the pace of innovation needs to pick up.

and also the centers built around that.

The conversation usually centers on big-ticket items.

But what about the smaller checks going out the door? The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has been digging through grants awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which has a budget of about, well, almost $1.5 billion this year.

Among the projects it flagged are research involving Canadian dance floors, low-carbon video games, ancient Mesopotamian brewers, and even former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's speeches.

Now, strange-sounding research isn't necessarily useful research, but the Taxpayers Federation says these grants raise a bigger question about how the government decides what taxpayers should be funding and whether there is room to cut.

And I appreciate it, right? Like, we're really grasping for straws.

I think the main point here is that, well, there's two, okay? Because, you know, I should have provided some extra context here.

That's a billion dollars more than every year that's going through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

That's on top of the $18 billion the federal government sends to the provinces through the Canada Social Transfer.

means that not all views that might be expressed on this show necessarily reflect all the views of those in the partnership.

And they may not reflect the views of our funder, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Like, that is a big amount of work to try to get through.

So then we ended up applying for a grant from, uh, SSHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, to hire some students.

We had one Indigenous student and one settler student who took what I was doing but to the next level.

They brought video cameras, and they videoed the translators saying the lines, and then they had subtitles in English and in the Indigenous languages.

So that can be anything from, like, award management.

So when someone wins an award from a tri-agency, so a SSHRC, an NSERC, or a CIHR postdoc, I usually liaise with them, their faculty supervisor, their department, help make sure that their award is going well.

I also help with people completing their applications with CIHR, so a little bit of award management.

Do some professional development support, which is super fun, so getting to run programming with different partners across campus, anyone from, from HR over to some individual faculty members.

So coming to that when I reach out with questions, 'cause I know I'm gonna have a lot of questions when I start at a new workplace, [chuckles] in general.

And then just understanding it's gonna take a while for people to get back to me and, and that kind of thing.

thing.And those SSHRC grants are so fun.

Yes.

This is a really good question.

I mean, I think the first thing to note is that the Canada Research Chairs like tri council agencies which is the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council or SSHRC NSERC and the Canadian institute health re-health research, um, have been quite aggressive in their EDI polices.

So they're gone for hard quotas on race and sex for example whereas in many corporations for example we saw report out recently with the Aristotle Foundation all companies will signal that they have targets perhaps but they won't implement hard quotas.

Uh.

But more importantly, this volume does really important and gratifying work in taking a phenomenon, globalization, that is so often anthropocentric and economistic, and shows that the history of globalization is not only a history that is also about wildlife, but that it's a history that couldn't have happened without wildlife.

De Bont and his co-editors Tom Quick, an independent scholar based in Berlin, and Vanessa Bateman, who is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Trent University, Canada, treat their core concepts, globalization and wildlife, with care and deep thought.

They refuse to define wildlife as something given, something out there and detached from humanity, and instead make clear that wildlife is always a situated definition that reveals more about the values and cultures that use it as a label.

They also build on longer critiques of globalization, some of which reject globalization, either did it ever happen or maybe we've always been global, and some of which seek to redefine globalization by drawing attention to its contingency, to its materiality, to its embodiment, and indeed to its animals.