York University has gained six new Canada Research Chairs and two renewed Canada Research Chairs. The announcement of the Canada Research Chair (CRC) appointments was made by the Minister of Science Kristy Duncan on Feb. 9. Tier 1 CRCs will receive $1.4 million over seven years and Tier 2 CRCs will receive $500,000 over five years. Two of the six chairs are faculty members of LA&PS.
Rosemary Coombe, professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Social Science, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS), is the Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication, and Culture (Tier 1). She will continue to build a larger research program exploring the proliferation of cultural rights in international policy fields that simultaneously enable new forms of informational capital, afford new opportunities for communities to exercise political autonomies on cultural grounds, and enable the revitalization of living and customary law in resource management. While mapping an unexplored transnational political actor network that has institutionalized new understandings of bio-cultural rights and responsibilities, Coombe considers the development of new technologies for community environmental and political self-government.
Christopher Kyriakides, associate professor in the Department of Sociology (LA&PS), is Canada Research Chair in Socially Engaged Research in Race and Racialization (Tier 2). Kyriakides' “Racialized Reception Contexts” research program focuses on configurations of racialization in relation to the meaning of East/West, South/North, and the articulations of racism and nationalism in the reception of refugees in Europe, North America and the Middle East. His research, which is guided by the understanding that racialization, particularly in light of the post-9/11 “war on terror,” works with the historical conditions of racism specific to a given national formation, but in a dynamic global context. The initial five-country analysis of Canada, the United States, Italy, Greece and Jordan, will examine the extent to which policy instruments and media discourse related to the global refugee crisis negatively impacts racialized communities in each reception context.