Four Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) instructors have been named recipients of a Chancellor’s Chair award to support innovative research in various disciplines.
The 2024 awards support projects aiming to shift perspectives about history in northeast India, integrate UN Sustainable Development Goals into K-12 education, explore the impacts of neo-colonialism, and empower communities to effect real change. Each award provides the researcher with $60,000 over three years and release time from classroom commitments.
“These awards allow our faculty members to continue the advancement of their field of scholarship,” says Dr. Diane Purvey, Provost and Vice-President, Academic at KPU. “This year’s recipients are a testament to the talent and expertise of instructors at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.”
Dr. Candy Ho, an instructor in KPU’s Educational Studies Department, will undertake a project to enhance the university’s efforts to integrate the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into B.C.’s K-12 education system. The award provides the resources and recognition needed to contribute meaningfully to Canada’s commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, explains Ho, who adds the funding will provide high quality experiential learning and mentorship to research assistants and $1,000 honorariums for teachers participating in a professional learning community focused on SDG-infused lesson plans.
“Over the next three years, 20 educators will engage in this program, and their innovative work will be made open access, benefiting educators and students worldwide,” says Ho. “As a researcher, educator, and parent, I see the transformative potential of integrating the SDGs into curricula — not just for students but for teachers as well.”
The research of Dr. Kyle Jackson, an instructor in KPU’s History Department, reevaluates the eastern Himalayas’ role in the history of empire and Asian borderlands, urging a shift of perspectives that begin in the highlands and work outwards from this geographically and culturally significant region.
While redefining upland populations in colonial India as mobile and global agents, Jackson also aims to create a collaborative graphic history of a long-forgotten Indian labour unit in the First World War to integrate comics scholarship with historical practice, and explore experiences of the night in colonial and postcolonial Northeast India.
“Historians based in North America and Britain have collectively focused the majority of their research on North America and Europe. My research bucks that trend,” says Jackson. “In an era of increasingly complex contact between mainland India and its understudied northeast, the need to challenge enduring colonial stereotypes about remoteness and tribal primitivism is more urgent than ever.”
KPU sociology instructor Dr. Fabricio Telo will critically examine the international practices of Canadian companies, focusing on Brazilian Traction Light and Power’s role in developing infrastructure in Brazil’s major cities, and its implications for Brazil’s sovereignty. His study will explore the company’s involvement with Brazil's military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985, including its political support and economic benefits, and a specific case where families were forced to leave their land for the company to build a resort.
Telo says the project will also create an understanding of various forms of neo-colonialism, where Global North corporations extract value from their operations in the Global South.
“The Chancellor's Chair award allows me to hire four students to work on this project as research assistants. Collaborating with them in hands-on activities is one of the most rewarding components of research projects, as we can share the excitement of discovering new findings and seeing the results of our collective work,” says Telo.
Dr. Victor Martinez, a product design instructor in the Wilson School of Design at KPU, aims to engage diverse community groups using a systems thinking and design thinking methodology to facilitate the understanding of root causes and the creation of systemic interventions of complex social problems. The goal is to develop actionable plans and strategies to empower communities and effect change.
Martinez says the award will allow him to bring in students as research assistants and also engage with communities through various activities.
“Sustainability has been my work focus for the last 20 years. After all this time and work I reached the conclusion that in order to create meaningful and real change this has to come from within the communities,” says Martinez. “If we are to solve the great challenges we have as humanity, we will only do it by tackling them from a systemic perspective. We won't solve these problems with the same siloed mindset that created them. Communities need to have a voice and be the agents of their own future.”
More information about KPU’s research chairs is available from the Office of Research Services.