Canadian Scholars Research Articles

Replicating “Language Matters”: Taking Baselines into Account

Abstract This study evaluates the visibility of French-speaking scholars in Canadian political science by analyzing the reading materials assigned in Canadian politics courses. Extending Daoust et al.'s (2022) research, we establish a baseline for their calculations and build an original dataset gathered from all political science departments’ websites and Google Scholar. Our analysis based on three assumptions about the expected academic representation of francophones—Canada's linguistic composition, the makeup of political science departments and faculty members’ productivity—reveals a discrepancy favouring anglophone scholars by up to four percentage points. Our findings extend Daoust et al.'s (2022) contribution by highlighting a similar language-based bias in overall citation practices among Canadian scholars, with French-speaking authors being significantly under-cited compared to their English-speaking counterparts despite demonstrating higher levels of overall productivity. Implications for the future of the discipline are also discussed.

Inclusive Education: Canada’s Connection to the World: What Have We Learned?

The special issue of Exceptional Education International “Inclusive Education: Canada’s Connection to the World,” presents 12 articles focused on the research that Canadian scholars are engaged in with partners across the globe. This final article provides a conclusion for the special issue. It is an overview of these articles and highlights key learnings of the comparative international research presented herein.

Approaching the Freedom Convoy: Intra-disciplinary reflections on religion scholars as public intellectuals

This special issue crystalizes the reflections of a handful of Canadian scholars, initially written in the months following the Freedom Convoy’s occupation of downtown Ottawa (and then refined in the subsequent year), who consider the various ways in which the contemporary media oversimplified (or, more often, utterly ignored) the role(s) of religion in this event. This introduction uses the convoy’s occupation as an opportunity to revisit the role of the religious studies scholar as a public intellectual in contemporary Canada. In so doing, it explores the problem of hyperspecialization in the field of religious studies, the fraught discourse landscape in which all contemporary scholars of religion now operate, and the resultant frequent failure to operate as ‘critical rhetors’ (in Russell McCutcheon’s terms) when confronted by events like the convoy. It concludes by offering three practical observations: (1) engaging in intra-disciplinary conversations (like this one) better prepares scholars of religion to communicate with the public; (2) given that many scholars are employees of taxpayer-funded institutions (and thus are, by definition, ‘public intellectuals’), it behoves every scholar to decide what this means (no matter how idiosyncratically) and then to behave as such; and (3) thinking and writing about complex, messy phenomena like the convoy provides a valuable opportunity for scholars to articulate their own positions on who they are writing for and why – questions that no longer have simple answers in an era when much of scholarly production is no longer ensconced behind paywalled journals or within access-controlled academic libraries. This final point is, of course, informed by Laurie Patton’s cogent concluding reflections in Who Owns Religion?

Welcoming Writers, Welcoming Instructors

Canadian scholars increasingly recognize the importance of diverse and inclusive writing pedagogies to welcome students of various races, languages, orientations, genders, and abilities. Yet, if instructors do not feel welcomed into using the tools of antiracist and decolonial writing pedagogies, they often will not use them, and many feel very new to the task. Using microlevel language policies (in both direct and indirect ways) can be a helpful way to integrate these pedagogies into writing instruction effectively; they can help instructors to both signal and live out their commitments to inclusive writing pedagogies. In this paper, I will use analytic and reflective methodologies to explore my assignment of an argumentative paragraph and the processes around it to demonstrate some simple, effective ways writing instructors can integrate antiracist and decolonial writing pedagogies into their teaching. Ultimately, I demonstrate that multimodal assignments can encourage linguistic, digital, and textual diversity in student writing and are thus vital to inclusive pedagogy.

"Grandparents for the Next Generation"

Paul Kei Matsuda (1999) has written about the divide between U.S. composition and applied linguistics, which he attributes to an institutionalization of the division of labour between Applied Linguistics and composition in the early 1960’s. As such, when language concerns resurfaced in composition in the early-2000s, this division of labour led to a “lack of a community of knowledgeable peers who [could] ensure intellectual accountability” among compositionists (Matsuda 2013). Did this same divide occur in a Canadian context, or has the field of second language writing developed differently in Canada? The goal of this paper is to construct a history of L2 writing scholarship, reading for any collaboration with writing studies as both fields “grew up” together in Canada. To this end, the paper extends the work of Alister Cumming who narrates the evolution of L2 writing scholarship in Canada. Using data from Cumming’s “Studies of Second-Language Writing in Canada: Three Generations,” this paper reports findings from archival research that traces the publication history of key knowledge-workers (identified by Cumming) from the 80s to the 2000s. These findings tell a story about how L2 writing developed as a field in Canada and the ways it was influenced by fields like education and applied linguistics. Ultimately, these findings contribute to the broader narrative of how L2 writing has professionalized in Canadian higher education. By investigating the historic formation of L2 writing in Canada, scholars, writing instructors, and writing program administrators can draw on historic relations to create writing pedagogy that best meets the needs of an increasingly linguistically diverse writing classroom.

Studies of Second-Language Writing in Canada

Canada’s social and educational policies have always involved immigrant settlement and English-French bilingualism. Research on writing in second languages emerged in the 1980s from graduate programs of education and applied linguistics at major universities in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver, particularly scholars investigating cognitive and learning processes and rhetorical characteristics of writing in English as a mother tongue. In the 1990s several Canadian scholars established systematic programs of research focused on L2 composing processes, writing for academic purposes, assessment, and innovative educational programs— spawning, in turn, in the 2000s a third generation of L2 writing researchers who have now established themselves across Canada and around the world.

Internationalization of Higher Education -- Reflections from a Canadian Scholar: Interview with Prof. Marianne A. Larsen

Internationalization of Higher Education -- Reflections from a Canadian Scholar: Interview with Prof. Marianne A. Larsen

Rethinking the three origin stories for communication studies in North America

There are three origin stories for communication studies in North America: the Public Speaking tradition in the United States, the Mass Communication tradition in the United States, and the Media Ecology tradition rooted in Canadian scholarship. In this Probe, I want to talk about the three traditions, as I understand them. Then, I want to talk about some experiences surveying residents of rural Lake and Cook counties in Northeastern Minnesota about internet access. Those experiences pushed me to rethink the importance of the third, Canadian tradition of communication studies. This third tradition emphasizes the importance of the materiality of communication, and it is the tradition embraced by media ecology, and I think it asks questions that every communication scholar should think about.

Sans Titre - No Title ]Professional Ethics and Law in Education: A Canadian Guidebook by Bruce Maxwell, Dianne Gereluk and Christopher Martin, Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars, 2022

Sans Titre - No Title ]Professional Ethics and Law in Education: A Canadian Guidebook by Bruce Maxwell, Dianne Gereluk and Christopher Martin, Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars, 2022

A Dialogue with Dr. Marilyn A. Ray: Nurse Scholar and USAF Veteran.

Dr. Marilyn A. Ray, nurse scholar and retired United States Air Force (USAF) veteran and former flight nurse, began her nursing scholarship in Canada. She was influenced by the experiences and interprofessional scholarly ideas that she encountered along her career trajectory. Her early love of the air and space led her to the United States Air Force Nurse Corps, where she served as a flight nurse during the Vietnam war era, followed by leadership positions in nursing education, administration, practice, and research. Dr. Ray's contributions to nursing knowledge includes two nursing theories and a caring inquiry methodology. Dr. Ray is helping to create a new caring science certificate program at Florida Atlantic University, Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing. In this column, Dr. Ray shares the story of her scholarly influences and how they helped her care for her husband and gain insight into her contributions to nursing knowledge development.

Sumida Huaman, E., & Martin, N. D. (2020). Indigenous knowledge systems and research methodologies: Local solutions and global opportunities. Canadian Scholars.

Sumida Huaman, E., & Martin, N. D. (2020). Indigenous knowledge systems and research methodologies: Local solutions and global opportunities. Canadian Scholars.

What nursing chooses not to know: Practices of epistemic silence/silencing.

Drawing from a keynote panel held at the hybrid 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference, this discussion paper examines the question of epistemic silence in nursing from five different perspectives. Contributors include US-based scholar Claire Valderama-Wallace, who meditated on ecosystems of settler colonial logics of nursing; American scholar Lucinda Canty discussed the epistemic silencing of nurses of colour; Canadian scholar Amelie Perron interrogated the use of disobedience and parrhesia in and for nursing; Canada-based scholar Ismalia De Sousa considered what nursing protects in its silences; and Australian scholar Janice Gullick spoke to trans invisibility in nursing.

The gender citation gap: Why and how it matters.

The weight of evidence suggests that articles written by men and women receive citations at comparable rates. This suggests that research quality or gender-based bias in research evaluation and citing behaviors may not be the reason why academic women accumulate fewer citations than men at the career level. In this article, I outline a career perspective that highlights women's disadvantages in career progression as the root causes for the gender citation gap. I also consider how the gender citation gap may perpetuate the unequal pay between genders in science. My analysis of two different datasets, one including paper and citation information for over 130,000 highly cited scholars during the 1996-2020 period and another including citation and salary information for nearly 2,000 Canadian scholars over the 2014-2019 period, shows several important findings. First, papers written by women on average receive more citations than those written by men. Second, the gender citation gap grows larger with time as men and women progress in their careers, but the opposite pattern holds when research productivity and collaborative networks are considered. Third, higher citations lead to higher pay, and gender differences in citations explain a significant share of the gender wage gap. Findings demonstrate the critical need for more attention toward gender differences in career progression when investigating the causes and solutions for gender disparities in science.

Kutsyuruba, B., Cherkowski, S., & Walker, K. D. (Eds). (2021). Leadership for Flourishing in Educational Contexts. Canadian Scholars

Kutsyuruba, B., Cherkowski, S., & Walker, K. D. (Eds). (2021). Leadership for Flourishing in Educational Contexts. Canadian Scholars. An article from journal Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy / Revue canadienne en administration et politique de l’éducation (Number 201, 2022, pp. 2-115), on Érudit.

Conference "80 years of russia-canada relations, 1942-2022"

The article provides information about the international scientific conference dedicated to the 80-th anniversary of the establishment of Russian-Canadian diplomatic relations which was held at St. Petersburg State University as part of the First Saint-Petersburg Congress on International Studies “Global and Regional Challenges in the Changing World”, held on November 10-12, 2022. It is noted that that this conference was the only public event dedicated to the anniversary date both in Russia and in Canada. It is shown that a significant number of Canadian scholars from all over Russia took part in the conference. Their presentations, devoted to various aspects of Canadian history, politics, culture, and the social sphere, showed an extremely high level of academic knowledge.

Just Research: Advancing Antiracist and Antioppressive Social Work Research.

The Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) created its Research Capacity and Development Committee in 2017 to build research capacity across the careers of social work scholars. The committee has initiated multiple conferences and webinar sessions that have increasingly focused on antiracist and antioppressive (ARAO) research, including "Mentorship for Antiracist and Inclusive Research" and "Strategies for Supporting Antiracist Pedagogy & Scholarship: Reimagining Institutional Systems & Structures." This commentary integrates themes from these sessions and other discussions among committee members about strategies to advance ARAO research. Although SSWR board members reviewed and approved this submission, it is not an official statement of SSWR or its board of directors.

Open, Collaborative Commons: Web3, Blockchain, and Next Steps for the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons

This paper provides an update on the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an in-development online hub for open social scholarship in Canada and beyond, and considers the next steps for the platform in an ever-evolving digital landscape. It outlines various recent outreach and engagement events intended to introduce the Canadian HSS Commons to the larger communities to which it belongs. Because the Canadian HSS Commons is committed to supporting the growth and evolving needs of these communities, this paper also considers how increasingly popular internet technologies such as Web3 and blockchain might play a part in the future of digital research infrastructure and the Canadian HSS Commons specifically. It concludes that while Web3 and blockchain currently raise important questions and concerns about governance, accountability, and commercialization, in the near future, these same technologies could also help engender new forms of functionality and participation on the Commons.

Stress across the Lifespan: From Risk to Management-Conference Report on the Inaugural Canadian Stress Research Summit.

In 2021, the Toronto Metropolitan University Institute for Stress and Wellbeing Research welcomed over 200 conference delegates across Canada to the inaugural Canadian Stress Research Summit (CSRS) to share ideas and foster collaboration among Canadian scholars. This conference was unique from existing international stress-related conferences as it bridged science and community. The objective of this conference report is to provide an overview of the 3-day virtual inaugural stress conference, offering a summary of the keynote addresses, themed symposia, spotlight presentations, graphical designs of selected presentations, and conference feedback. Overall, the CSRS highlighted important methodological considerations in understanding the relationship between stress exposure and various outcomes of interest that pertain to the mental health and wellbeing of Canadians. Furthermore, there is a need for continued work to understand stress across the lifespan from an inclusive and diverse Canadian lens.

Writing Canada’s antebellum Black history: the work of Fred Landon

White Canadian historian Fred Landon (1880-1969) was a pioneer in writing the history of Black freedom-seekers in mid-nineteenth-century Canada West and noteworthy for treating the publications of both Black and white writers and abolitionists as sources for the historical record and thus as equal contributors to historical knowledge of this period. He has been an important source for nineteenth-century Black history for both American and Canadian scholars, yet no analysis of his work exists. Landon’s selectivity in citing sources, his recurrent topics, and his tone and diction together generate a sense of the Black presence in Ontario as a historical romance more than a search for equality, a romance that came to an end, and a search that was perhaps perceived to be no longer necessary once American Emancipation was secured. His work, though ground-breaking and well intentioned, orients readers to a narrative in which early ‘Canada’ saves refugees from American cruelty, and thus may have contributed to the mythology of Canada’s benevolence on white-Black race relations, a key trait of Canada’s anti-American nationalism to this day.

Under-Served: Health Determinants of Indigenous, Inner-City, and Migrant Populations in Canada. Akshaya Neil Arya, A. N., & Thomas Piggott (Editors). Canadian Scholars, 2018, 424 pages

Under-Served: Health Determinants of Indigenous, Inner-City, and Migrant Populations in Canada. Akshaya Neil Arya, A. N., & Thomas Piggott (Editors). Canadian Scholars, 2018, 424 pages. An article from journal Canadian Social Work Review / Revue canadienne de service social (Volume 39, Number 1, 2022, pp. 5-185), on Érudit.