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Failler Earns Chancellor’s Research Chair

Dr. Angela Failler

Photo by Kelsey A. Clifford.

WINNIPEG, MB –The University of Winnipeg is pleased to appoint the second Chancellor’s Research Chair, Dr. Angela Failler, Associate Professor in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies. Failler leads a new Cultural Studies research team at UWinnipeg consisting of sixteen co-investigators who are faculty members from across the Humanities and Social Sciences.  The team has launched a collaborative research project engaging with the developments of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR).

“The challenges faced by those in the public sphere who seek to commemorate and remember are well worth attention, investigation, and discussion,” said UWinnipeg Vice-President (Research and International) Dr. Neil Besner. “We are especially pleased to support Dr. Failler’s proposal, situated in the emerging field of cultural studies in relation to human rights, and look forward to seeing results from this interdisciplinary and collaborative research project.”

Failler and her team will undertake a project that emerges out of a desire to contribute to the potential for the CMHR to serve as a meaningful site of cultural production, public dialogue, and pedagogical encounter in Winnipeg. The project’s overall objectives are to develop a collaborative methodology alongside diverse local communities for timely engagement with emergent issues in the public arena, and to think with and through the challenges faced by the CMHR in representing human rights.

The project will serve as a model for public-intellectual exchange and demonstrate the rich contribution of Cultural Studies scholarship in Canada to critical discussions of human rights and social justice on the national and international stage.

Failler currently holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Standard Research Grant (SRG) as Principal Investigator of a program entitled “Building Communities of Memory: Remembrance Practices After the 1985 Air India Bombings”, which theorizes the impact of the bombings on the national imagination in terms of how Canadians conceive of themselves, each other, and what it means to be Canadian – particularly in a post-9/11 culture of “war on terror.”  The relevance of this research for the newly launched collaborative project lies in its attention to how public engagement with representations of human loss and suffering can be used to foster a better understanding of the conditions necessary for promoting and protecting human rights and social justice.

The Chancellor’s Research Chair is an initiative begun in 2011 and supported by the Chancellor; the President of the University of Winnipeg; and the Vice-President, Academic and Vice-President, Research and International. It entails a $7500 Research Grant awarded annually for three years and course release.

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