Reading reflects key chapters in seniors’ lives

Dog-eared pages, stacks of magazines and a worn library card can all represent the rich relationship senior Canadians have with their books. And Faculty of Information & Media Studies professor Paulette Rothbauer is using these representations to help change conversations about aging.

For Canada’s elderly, reading improves mental and emotional well-being, lowers anxiety, builds relationships and nurtures social relationships.

Yet reading programs for the elderly almost always focus on reading as bibliotherapy: a way to prevent cognitive decline or to treat mental and psychological disorders.

“They fail to recognize the pleasures of reading that are vital for many older adult readers,” Rothbauer said.

Rothbauer is one of the first researchers in Canada to explore and document – through conversational interviews with Canadian seniors between the ages of 75-90 – the value and meaning they place on reading.

Her work is providing nursing homes and public libraries with a better understanding of the critical role reading plays in the lives of Canada’s seniors.

In the process, she is showing books are more than just prescriptions to prevent or cure something unpleasant; they can also be used to nourish and nurture their lives. Books often act as friends, therapists, grief counselors and painkillers.

During their conversations about books and reading, Rothbauer’s interviewees would often end up speaking of their personal struggles, triumphs, losses and their moments of grief and joy.

“When you ask them about their reading histories, they inevitably tell you about their life and what has been important in their lives then and now,” she said.

Many refer to their books as ‘old friends.’ One participant had a pile of notebooks on the table.

“She had her hand on them and she would touch them while answering my questions,” Rothbauer recalled.

The notebooks contained detailed lists of all the books she had read over many decades. In many instances, some of these books brought back memories of important life events – marriage or the birth of a grandson, for example.

“When older people have to move into care homes or nursing homes, one of the first things to go is books,” Rothbauer said. “If books are tied so closely and intimately to who you are as a person, what does it mean to get rid of them when you have to move into smaller spaces?”

For the first time in Canada’s history, 2016 census figures show the senior demographic outnumbers children – and their numbers will continue to grow.

Attitudes and policies towards Canada’s seniors are often one-dimensional, treating them solely as weak, old and frail beings in need of physical care.

Rothbauer’s work is a reminder of seniors’ rich and complex lives, full of stories and experiences. And they signal a need for shaping policies around a range of abilities and needs.

Literary accessibility means more than the physical format of a book, she said.

Rothbauer interviewed one avid 90-year-old reader, who had lost some of her mobility, was on medication and was confined to her apartment most of the time.

She told Rothbauer, “Books help me directly deal with the pain that I have.”

Even though she was alone at home, reading kept her from isolation by allowing her to maintain social connections – her niece, grandsons and library workers would always deliver her books.

Federal and provincial governments actively encourage young people to read but Rothbauer believes they should remember seniors as well.

“Good things also come from encouraging a reading culture, and (providing) access to material to older populations,” Rothbauer said. “It goes beyond just large print or audio-books.”

Exploring how yoga healed a broken country

Dunna, a Colombian non-profit organization, is healing its country – one yoga class at a time.

For the past 10 years, the organization has taught yoga to victims of the Colombian Conflict – a 60-year civil war that ended only two years ago – to help them cope with traumatic experiences, regain trust in one another and, in the process, rebuild Colombia.

It’s working. Recently, the Colombian government officially became one of its biggest sponsors.

Mayme Audra Lefurgey, a graduate student in Western’s collaborative program between Women’s Studies and Feminist Research and the Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction, recently spent three months in Colombia, interviewing Dunna’s staff and participants, as well as other non-governmental organizations for her doctoral research.

She hopes to document the group’s groundbreaking work and identify reasons for its success.

Her thesis will be a critical reference for governments exploring alternative ways to help vulnerable populations deal with grief, trauma and pain. She sees opportunities for her work to benefit, for example, Indigenous Peoples and incarcerated populations in Canada, Syrian refugees in Canada, Germany and Turkey, and victims of rape and sexual violence in Rwanda and Sierra Leone.

“Psychological help, even when offered, is often limited,” Lefurgey said. “The conflicts and traumas faced by victims are very complex and expressing it verbally isn’t always the most effective way.”

As Lefurgey found out in her interviews, victims of the Colombian Conflict sometimes cope with pain and trauma by stretching, breathing and letting go.

The Colombian Conflict began in the 1960s with a brutal power struggle between the Colombian government and paramilitary groups. Approximately 220,000 people, including 45,000 children, were killed. Two years ago, the government and Colombia’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym, FARC), signed a peace accord and officially ended the conflict.

Governments, non-governmental organizations and volunteer groups continue to launch mental-health initiatives and counselling services throughout the conflicting regions until the present day.

These are meant to provide emotional and mental support to generations of Colombians scarred by six decades of violence, drug trafficking, rape, kidnappings and extortion.

For some of these victims, talking about their experience with doctors is crippling.

Yoga gives them an alternative way to revisit their pain, without having to directly confront it.

Dunna’s instructors follow trauma-sensitive yoga protocols with their participants. For example, they allow participants to decide if they are ready for certain postures, like lying and relaxing on the ground, closing their eyes, or particular breathing exercises, all of which can potentially trigger traumatic flashbacks. They also use circular layouts for yoga mats to prevent abused persons from feeling observed by someone practicing behind them.

Unlike typical yoga classes that are usually 45 minutes to one hour and primarily focus on poses, Dunna’s classes last for 90 minutes – only 30 minutes of which focus on poses. The rest consist of deep relaxation, guided meditation and specialized breathing techniques.

“These victims have experienced intense trauma and many are always on edge,” Lefurgey said. “Before Dunna, they didn’t know what it was to be relaxed and the experience of yoga has been revolutionary for them in their healing processes.”

The group faced resistance from the government when it first introduced yoga as an alternative option to help the conflict’s traumatized victims in 2010.

“Dunna had to justify its request for funding a solution whose benefits were not scientifically proven,” Lefurgey says.

Since, Dunna has partnered with psychologists and neuroscientists to validate the effects of yoga. For example, in one recent research paper, psychologists showed yoga lowers the rates of PTSD in Dunna’s participants. “They do the work, but continue to prove why it is so useful,” she said.

For participants, who range from former FARC members, to young offenders, to parents who lost their children in the conflict, yoga helps them decompress, feel safe and trust each other again.

“These participants realize they can have differences and still learn to co-exist with theirs partners at home, their children and their community,” Lefurgey said. “Eventually, this translates to how the country processes conflict and political situations in a broader sense.”

Taking students deeper into a foreign language

A little conversation goes a long way.

Just ask Meredith McGregor.

By mixing together digital technologies like e-portfolios and online mentoring sessions via Skype, the Hispanic Studies graduate student and Spanish language teacher helps university students who are overseas on Study Abroad and Exchange (SAE) programs become fluent in their chosen foreign language – she does so by developing their pragmatic skills.

Pragmatic skills guide us on how to use language (what we say and how we say it) in culturally appropriate ways. It involves knowing, for example, when to use formal or informal pronouns of address, whether or not to use honorifics, or knowing the correct words when apologizing to someone.

In Western’s SAE programs, students attend foreign universities, ranging from a semester to a year. But these programs are more than just academics – students experience different cultures and bring back with them a better awareness and understanding of the social and cultural diversity around them.

Based on her research work with students in Costa Rica, McGregor is now designing a language curriculum for SAE students that will help develop pragmatic skills before they leave for their destination country and during their time abroad – a critical addition for the program. Typically, SAE students have a basic understanding their destination country’s language that does not extend beyond asking for directions and grocery shopping.

“This nuanced understanding of the language opens doors to a wider culture and enriched experience, where students can comfortably and confidently engage with the local populace and immerse in their culture,” McGregor said.

McGregor was the first SAE student to attend the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) when Western had an affiliation with it many years ago.

Over the course of the Fall 2016 semester, a group of French and German study abroad students attended UCR and agreed to participate in McGregor’s study. (At the time of her work, there were no Western students attending UCR.)

Most had an intermediate understanding of Spanish.

McGregor asked them to create an online portfolio in which they could record (via videos, photos or writings) their cultural experiences, daily observations, and note the ways in which the local population was speaking Spanish – region-specific idioms and dialects, for example.

Throughout the semester, they discussed the journal entries with her over Skype.

“These were simple informal conversations where I would give them some advice or share my thoughts on their experiences,” McGregor said.

She would, for example, suggest them to volunteer at a local shelter, or join a book club, or play with the soccer team. This way, McGregor was gently pushing them outside their comfort zones and encouraging them to use Spanish beyond just shopping lists, helping them engage with the wider community in a deeper, more involved way.

In other words, she was helping them develop their pragmatic skills.

She found the Skype conversations and their online portfolios helped the students.

At the semester’s beginning, they had taken a basic Spanish test (administered by McGregor) to assess their reading, writing, and comprehension skills. The test included an extremely challenging portion where they had to discuss their opinions, beliefs and desires using grammatically correct Spanish – all critical outcomes of one’s pragmatic skills. When they re-took the test at the semester’s end, their overall scores in general, and in the ‘pragmatic skills’ portion in particular, increased significantly.

They were able to communicate better with their neighbours and the local population. As a result they came back with richer, more meaningful experiences, according to their feedback to McGregor.

“Digital technology helps, but human interaction is critical,” McGregor says.

“The simple act of thinking about what they were doing, talking about it and writing about it was meaningful,” McGregor says, adding that, “It helped them acquire the language in a more effective way.”

Revitalizing Indigenous Education and redefining scholarship

Education is considered to be one of the most potent tools to improve the lives of young Indigenous peoples in Canada. And its work remains unfinished, according to one Western researcher.

More than half of Canada’s youngest and fastest-growing population hasn’t finished high school. Only 6 per cent have a university degree. Unemployment among Indigenous Peoples is more than twice the Canadian average.

Western Education professor Brent Debassige wants to change those statistics.

Working with the First Nations With Schools Collective (FNWSC) – a group of schools from eight First Nation communities in Ontario, Debassige is helping the communities independently establish and run a properly funded First Nations education systems for their communities.

“There are leaders and educators in the FNWSC and elsewhere who are working every day to change this reality,” Debassige said. “They are championing this work through the collective with very little financial support from the federal government.

“Within that system are happy and healthy children and educators who are accomplishing excellence in educational achievement and who are adept Indigenous knowledge-holders of their languages and cultures.”

Despite underfunding and provincially mandated curriculums not always culturally sensitive, First Nations communities have administered First Nations education since the 1970s with varying levels of success, Debassige explained.

“There is a lot of expertise within each of these communities, ranging from knowledge about specific medicinal plants to the effects of changing weather patterns on different crops, and sustainable approaches to fishing or hunting deer,” he said. In Indigenous communities, such experts are known ‘knowledge keepers’.

This information, for example, will be critical to helping Indigenous Peoples (and other Canadian populations) cope with the effects of climate change and global warming. Given their traditional lifestyles and geographic locations, they remain extremely vulnerable to such effects.

For his work, Debassige will conduct informal interviews with teachers, principals and Indigenous Elders to identify ‘knowledge keepers’ and develop ways to engage them with young school-going Indigenous children in conventional classroom settings.

Indigenous Educators from Australia are already exploring these strategies and applying them to their own communities. Debassige hopes to create a database of teaching tools and resources that will be used by Indigenous communities across Canada and all over the world.

Through his research, Debassige wants to help rebuild a culture of trust and cooperation between Indigenous ways of learning and knowing, and conventional schooling in Canada.

“My vision is that Indigenous knowledge systems shouldn’t have to lose or compromise their integrity,” Debassige said. “Rather, both Indigenous knowledge systems and conventional schooling should work together.”

In Indigenous communities, knowledge and teachings are passed on in the form of oral traditions, such as songs, stories and poems. Children have long learned valuable life lessons and skills through these methods.

“If you don’t carry it in you, then what use is it?” Debassige said.

Yet, over the two centuries, the conventional classroom-style of education has displaced informal Indigenous ways of knowing and learning in Canadian classrooms, including in First Nations schools.

By highlighting the importance of re-introducing traditional knowledge systems into the schools of First Nation communities, Debassige is making sure that the next generation of Indigenous children have more opportunities to re-acquaint themselves with their languages, cultures and traditions. “This work is a commitment for me and I want to fulfill a responsibility to my own community, which has given me so much,” he said.

Debassige has fostered his relationship with several members of the FNWSC for almost six years, working with Indigenous Peoples at every stage of his research work.

“To me, active community engagement has tremendously more value than me writing an academic publication that may be completely disassociated from people on the ground who need that knowledge immediately,” he said.

In Debassige’s experience, when he works with Indigenous community members, the whole community is involved in the production of knowledge; its application to real life problems is almost immediate.

“We don’t see universities acknowledging that type of scholarship though, and it’s long overdue. I say to the ivory tower, come join Indigenous scholarship in the 21st century,” he said.

Cross-border love a complex affair

In the world of Kate Choi, the wedding ring is a portable mini-architect – it builds bridges between people and their families; it shapes entire neighbourhoods and communities.

But before building these bridges, newly arrived immigrants have to break down walls of culture, language, income, education and race.

By examining marital choices of immigrants, the Western Sociology professor is pioneering ways of studying the consequences of international migration.

“In multicultural societies, the spousal choice of immigrants is a barometer of social acceptance and integration. Intimate unions require a higher degree of acceptance, compared to hiring someone or becoming friends with someone,” Choi said.

At Western, Choi is continuing research she began as a doctoral student in the United States – namely, how does international migration alter marriage choices in both origin and destination countries?

As Choi is finding out, beneath quickening pulses and aching hearts is a steady hand guided by economics, demographics and education.

Mexican migration to the United States is a particularly interesting example because it is ‘gender selective,’ she said. “Traditionally, 70 per cent of Mexican migrants in the United States are men; since it is for labour purposes, most men who go are of marriageable age.”

In Mexico, this opens the pool of potential wives for non-migrating men. And because there are fewer available men, it also limits the pool of potential husbands for non-migrating women.

The average Mexican male immigrant has a Grade 8 education, which is the average level of educational attainment in Mexico.

“A sizable portion of Mexican migrants often work in America for a few years, amass a certain amount of wealth and come back home to live comfortably with family and friends,” Choi said.

They then tend to ‘marry up’ beyond their levels of schooling to more highly educated women who remained in Mexico.

Across the border, it’s a similar love story.

Male Mexican migrants who become permanent settlers in America also ‘marry up’ in education. Their partners, generally Mexican-American women with slightly more schooling, often prefer the newly arrived (but lesser-educated) Mexican immigrants to native-born Mexican-Americans with equivalent educations. From the wives’ perspective, the former possess characteristics they don’t perceive in the latter, including work ethic and self-discipline.

“Spousal choices are important for the next generation,” Choi said. “Marriages between poorly educated and low-income individuals generally relegate their children into poverty; whereas when two highly educated, high-income individuals marry one another, the rich get richer.”

International migration reduces these social inequalities in wealth and education; it mixes and brings migrants and the native population closer to one another – despite disparate social, economic, educational and financial backgrounds.

“Racial, social and cultural mixing via marriage ensures greater social cohesion and social acceptance across groups,” Choi added.

Fashion offers new window into ancient Roman society

Most of our knowledge of ancient Roman history comes from male historians writing about the lives and contributions of Roman men – emperors, gladiators, engineers, artists and politicians. Women have been treated as mere historical footnotes – until now.

Western Classical Studies professor Kelly Olson is giving voice to the predominantly silent and forgotten women of ancient Rome.

For her latest book, Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity, she studies the fashion, jewelry and makeup of women in ancient Rome (753 BC-476 AD). In the process, Olson is pioneering the budding field of fashion in ancient times.

“Most studies in the field focus on a single piece of jewelry of a specific time period from one particular source say, an archaeological excavation,” she said.

Instead, Olson is studying 12 centuries-worth of fashion from a number of sources, such as paintings, statues, poetry, law treatises and philosophical works. These sources provide the only glimpses of female fashion in ancient Rome.

Her work is the first of its kind to track how fashion evolved in ancient Rome and how it differs from modern times. For example, unlike modern Western societies, ancient Romans considered jewelry to be good luck charms. They believed certain stones warded off evil and were endowed with magical properties.

Olson also discovered the most expensive stones in ancient Rome were pearls, not diamonds.

“Now, jewelry is selected by its sparkle; in ancient Rome, it was chosen by colour,” she said, speculating Romans did not have the technology to facet diamonds and make them sparkle.

But this history of fashion goes beyond trends and technology.

“Makeup and jewelry may seem trivial, but they give us a very intimate look into human society, including how attitudes of modesty, women’s freedom, self-expression, and creativity changed over the time,” Olson says.

Yet, as she is discovering, the ‘intimate look’ for the women of ancient Rome – accounts of their ordinary, everyday lives – can be very distant.

“If I were to study, for example, women in the 18th Century, I would have a wealth of personal resources – parish records, letters, and personal diaries, all written by women,” Olson explained. But few, if any such intimate and personal records written by women exist in ancient Rome.

Instead, Olson relies on sources – poems, sculptures, law manuals and philosophical works, for example – all created by men.

Her work helps us, for the first time, re-imagine these women’s lives through another woman’s lens. In studying these works, Olson is removing the perceived bias of men. Through her experience in the present, she is interpreting the lived history of their past.

Most works, according to Olson, viewed women with suspicion, paranoia and condescension. For example, some Roman philosophers objected to women beautifying and displaying themselves.

“Women in ancient Rome were not allowed to be lawyers or politicians or artists. Thus, they pumped their creative impulses into adornment,” Olson said. “Overly adorned women make Roman male authors nervous. They do not want women to have that kind power and it shows in their writings.”

But it’s not all bad.

Roman law considered jewelry to be a legal and portable source of wealth and power for women. There are laws describing how jewelry could be used as a social and financial safety net for women, and ways in which women could bequeath their jewelry to one another.

Roman artists celebrated women’s beauty and their adornment, capturing their admiration in poems, paintings and statues. Olson found there were no substances in ancient Rome used solely for make up purposes. Women used natural minerals or vegetable matter for make up; artists used these same materials to make colour, dyes and paintings.

“Its fitting, many Latin words for adornment are also used for art and painting,” Olson said. “Women literally became works of art.”

After years hidden in plain sight in a board set of texts, she is beginning to bring these works of art back to life.

Paving a way for gender justice in Sierra Leone

In Sierra Leone’s capital city, amidst an uneasy peace in the bloody aftermath of the country’s civil war, sat a shipping container converted into a makeshift courtroom. And inside this metal box, a team of lawyers sought to bring justice to women and young girls of this strike-torn country.

The lawyers were part of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and Western Law professor Valerie Oosterveld – who can be credited in part with SCSL’s beginnings – is writing its story.

Sierra Leone’s civil war began in 1991 with a rebel group’s attempt at a coup d’état, with the intention of controlling the country’s lucrative diamond mines.

During the next 11 years, more than 50,000 people lost their lives and half a million lost their homes. An additional 250,000 women and girls as young as seven were victims of sexual and gender-based violence. They endured rape, attempted rape, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation and forced marriage.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone was formed in 2002 to, in part, try those responsible for these atrocities.

Before she arrived at Western, Oosterveld served on the Canadian delegation to the Diplomatic Conference that adopted the International Criminal Court’s founding treaty, negotiating the gender provisions that expanded the legal definition of sexual and gender-based violence. She then joined Global Affairs Canada’s legal bureau and was involved in the ongoing negotiations on International Criminal Court.

She was also deeply involved in lobbying to establish the SCSL in Sierra Leone itself – previous special courts had taken place outside countries where the crimes had occurred. This one became the first international tribunal in history to convict perpetrators for the crimes-against-humanity of sexual slavery and forced marriage.

Last December, Osterveld’s name was added to the Gender Justice Legacy Wall at the International Criminal Court, an honour that recognizes pioneers in the field of international gender justice.

Oosterveld continues to closely follow the SCSL’s work. Supported by UN Women, she recently compiled a report in investigating and prosecuting sexual- and gender-based violence – a ‘how-to’ manual that will be a critical reference for similar cases in conflict zones anywhere in the world.

Special courts set up after the Cambodian, Yugoslavian, and Rwandan civil wars and genocides met with limited success in prosecuting of sexual and gender-based violence cases because of the narrow legal definition of these cases, which tended to focus on rape to the exclusion of other crimes against women.

“The experience of women and girls in the Rwandan genocide made clear that there were many types of sexual and gender-based violence that helped to perpetuate the genocide, apart from rape, including forced nudity, sexual abuse, sexual slavery and mutilation of breasts and genitalia,” Oosterveld said. “It is important to recognize these violations as crimes.”

The Special Court for Sierra Leone adopted a number of crimes listed in the International Criminal Court’s treaty. As a result, it was able to prosecute a greater number of thesse cases than previous special courts and pushed the boundaries of international criminal law.

During interviews with the Special Court team for her UN Women project, Oosterveld discovered the lengths its prosecutors went to in understanding crimes that occurred in Sierra Leone’s civil war. They gathered together women who had been abducted and forced into sexual and domestic slavery by rebel commanders to ask how these acts should be described in the charges; the victims clearly responded that ‘forced marriage’ was the best label. As a result, the term was added to the legal definition of sexual and gender-based violence.

“This level of consultation with sexual and gender-based violence victims had never been done before,” Oosterveld said. “It was critical because it directly gave the victims a hand in defining and dealing with their pain.”

Before this Special Court was convened, tribunals prosecuting crimes in the Yugoslav war and the Rwandan genocide had been established away from conflict zones, in The Hague and Arusha, respectively. It is much easier for groups opposed to the justice process to spread misinformation when special courts are inaccessible to the general population.

“One of the most important factors in the SCSL’s success was that it was there amidst the people who suffered the conflict,” Oosterveld says.

Prior to the SCSL, tribunals prosecuting crimes in the Yugoslav war and the Rwandan genocide had been established away from conflict zones, in The Hague and Arusha, respectively. It is much easier for groups opposed to the justice process to spread misinformation when special courts are in countries far from the conflict and inaccessible to the general population.

“One of the most important factors in the SCSL’s success was that it was there amidst the people who suffered the conflict,” Oosterveld said. “With the SCSL’s presence in-country, it was easier for the court’s outreach efforts to succeed. The court could respond immediately to inaccurate rumours and court keep the population informed.”

It did so under extremely harsh circumstances.

“Freetown – Sierra Leone’s capital – had been overrun and looted by the rebels,” Oosterveld said, painting a scene of a place with “no electricity or running water, shot windows and burnt houses.”

As the court operated on a minimal budget, justice for the women and girls of Sierra Leone began in an old shipping container with cut-out doors and windows and a team of lawyers.

“No one knew if any one of the armed elements would come back,” Oosterveld said, so the SCSL team all had security escorts.

“There was a precarious feeling, but everyone at this court was fully committed to bringing justice to Sierra Leone,” she adds. “They were willing to adapt and do whatever they needed to do to make this successful.”

Crucially, the first chief prosecutor appointed two experts in sexual- and gender-based violence to his team. “These staff members knew Sierra Leone intimately, and knew the war,” Oosterveld said. They helped gather evidence and direct the investigation, which in turn led to prosecutions and convictions.

The court had also learned lessons from history. “Unlike previous special courts, which were staffed almost entirely by outsiders, many members of the SCSL team were from Sierra Leone itself,” Oosterveld said.

The public felt directly involved in solving their own problems with locals on the team; it also eliminated the sense of perceived bias from outsiders. This included Sierra Leonean investigators who helped to connect the prosecution lawyers to victims of sexual and gender-based violence.

“Sierra Leone is a small country and the news about the court spread very quickly and was highly publicized,” Oosterveld said. As a result, women and young girls began to openly talk about the atrocities of forced marriages, sexual slavery and rape that they had faced at the hands of the perpetrators.

“During the war, women and young girls did not talk publicly about sexual or gender-based violence,” she added. “War created immense social problems for them.”

The stigma was crippling – the prevailing conception was that if a perpetrator had enslaved a woman or a young girl, then she, as the victim, became a rebel.

“The relationship between them was seen as violent, yet intimate,” Oosterveld said. The victim’s own family and her community viewed her as having gone over to the other side. It was worse for those who became pregnant – both child and mother were usually ostracized from society.

For the first time, the SCSL gave these women and girls a chance to talk about their experiences within a justice process.

Oosterveld wanted to document the steps that led to this success and approached UN Women to support the project.

Unlike similar projects done by the Yugoslavian and Rwandan special courts, which limited themselves mostly to lessons learned by prosecutors, Oosterveld and her team interviewed Special Court prosecutors, investigators, defence counsel, judges, court psychologists, victim protection officers and former members of the court’s registry (the court department providing psychological assistance to the victims and protecting them before, during and after trial).

“We wanted to understand how the whole team worked with each other, their challenges and unique perspectives,” Oosterveld said.

She presented findings of these interviews at the Canadian Mission to the UN in New York, speaking to an audience of diplomats, UN representatives and others attending an annual meeting of the International Criminal Court.

The SCSL is having an impact elsewhere in the world where violence against women occurs. For example, the International Criminal Court is using the special court’s approach to prosecute forced marriages in the civil war in Uganda. The processes developed in Sierra Leone could also help collect evidence and effect justice for women in other conflict areas such as Syria and Iraq.

Database lends ear to language evolution

Four years ago, Yasaman Rafat became a mother and faced a dilemma that affects millions of the country’s non-native English-speaking immigrants.

“How much of my native language, Farsi, do I speak with my son compared to English? When we are outside, do we speak in Farsi or English?” asked the Modern Languages and Literatures professor, who emigrated from Iran to Canada in her teens.

“My husband, who moved to Canada at a younger age than me, speaks both Farsi and English differently from me. I was curious to see how our son’s languages will develop in comparison with ours.”

With an inherent love for languages – Rafat speaks Farsi, English and Spanish, with a knowledge of Serbian and French – her interest now extends beyond her immediate family to immigrant families across Canada.

Today, she is developing the Canadian Multilingual Speech Database, a site that collects and documents speech samples of multilingual immigrants who speak both in native languages and English.

“The database will allow scholars to understand how different native languages change when they come in contact with English and new varieties of spoken English may evolve over the years,” Rafat explained.

While most research in linguistics focuses on how a language is structured, Rafat focuses on how a language sounds. Specifically, she is exploring how second-language sounds are picked up by second-language learners, and how native-language sounds may change.

Using recordings of speakers in both English and their native language, she will analyze how, for example, the pronunciation of a specific word in Farsi changes over three generations of Iranian-Canadian immigrants.

The database is in its first phase, where speech samples are being collected and documented of the native/heritage languages and English from first-, second- and third-generation multilingual immigrants living in Ontario. Later in the project, data collection will expand to other regions of Canada.

Currently, there is an American Speech Accent Archive and an Australian National Database of Spoken Language, but no Canadian database representing both English and native/heritage languages of immigrants.

“Studies have shown within six weeks of learning a new language, the native language of immigrants gets affected,” Rafat said.

Older generations of Canadian immigrants fear the gradual loss of their native languages. Rafat hopes her database will help them preserve that cultural heritage.

Using the data, she will also explore how different groups of non-native English speakers pronounce specific English words.

“The accent is not perceived as a ‘good thing.’ If you can’t speak ‘proper’ English, therefore you can’t ‘think properly,’” Rafat said. “Foreign accents in English do not need to be ‘corrected.’”

By recording varieties of English spoken by immigrant communities in Canada, Rafat is also documenting an important part of Canada’s heritage. “Let us acknowledge this diversity and embrace it,” Rafat said.

She works with graduate students in Hispanic Studies and Linguistics who come from many different immigrant backgrounds. “They have been enthusiastically helping me in setting up the database and will be instrumental during the data collection.”

Rafat wants the database to be a resource for linguistics researchers all over the world.

“If a researcher in Australia wants to study how Spanish sounds change across three generations of bilinguals or multilinguals in Canada, they would be able to use this database and compare it to sound change in Australia,” she explained.

The database has numerous possibilities, including serving as a reference for actors who want to learn how to imitate different accents, software engineers working on accent-recognition technology or sociologists and historians interested in questions about migration, societies and language.

Quest to document Indigenous youth suffering through art

For the estimated 150,000 Indigenous youth trapped in Canada’s residential schools, art was a salvation.

Under that system, Indigenous youth were removed from their families, isolated and often endured physical, mental and sexual abuse, hunger and disease. Many turned to art as a way of processing – and expressing – their pain. Not only was it a creative outlet but it helped preserve their culture.

Until recently, however, much of this history had been lost to time.

Western English & Writing Studies professor Julia Emberley has begun documenting many of these creative works, which include photographs, stories and artwork. Focusing on experiences from the 19th and 20th Centuries, she is also conducting parallel archival research of Indigenous elder and community testimonies to document personal accounts of experiences in the residential schools.

Emberley is currently one of a handful of researchers in the world bringing these unexplored works to public and scholarly knowledge. Her work will help Canadians better understand Indigenous history, which she points out is not accurately represented to the public or in the education curriculum.

“Historically, the Western colonial representation of Indigenous peoples is rarely accurate and has little, if nothing, to do with their actual lives and communities,” Emberley says. As an example, she cited her daughter’s high school history textbook that barely mentions the role of Indigenous Peoples in the War of 1812.

Emberley’s research also highlights a 19th-Century problem that continues to affect 21st –Century Indigenous communities. According to the Canada 2016 census, while 7 per cent of children in Canada are Indigenous, they account for nearly half of all foster children in the country.

Emberley believes the legacy of residential schools carries on in the education, health and economic inequalities between Indigenous communities and other Canadians, and is directly connected to the separation of Indigenous children from their families, culture and communities now.

The current generation of Indigenous children and youth is making a concerted effort to share its stories and regain its cultural identity. Emberley’s work highlights the belief of Indigenous communities in the healing power of stories, poems and dance when everything else has been taken away from them.

While reminders of a painful history, creative works by their 19th-Century ancestors are also a source of strength and inspiration for the future. The same tools of words, images and song Indigenous youth used to express their feelings about their experience in the residential schools are now being used by the current generation to highlight the challenges faced by Indigenous youth today.

For example, in response to a history of violence against Indigenous women, performance artist Helen Knott, an activist and spoken-word poet from the Dane Zaa and Nehiyawak of the Prophet River First Nation in British Colombia, launched Your Eyes They Curve Around Me to bring critical attention to violence against Indigenous women and girls.

“Indigenous youth are finding their voice now and expressing it through flash dance mobs, spoken-word, hip-hop and social-media platforms,” Emberley says. “It is important the current generation of Indigenous youth are expressing their challenges in their own words and in connection to the stories and histories of their communities.”

Documentary project celebrates legacy of Expo 67

For Constanza Burucúa, capturing the spirit of the 1967 World Exhibition in Montreal – known simply as Expo 67 for the last half century – required something special.

“I wanted to do something different from a mere academic study,” the Modern Languages and Literatures professor explained. “I wanted to capture personal memories, inspire optimism and share something visceral and immediate with the general public. You cannot do this with a formal academic paper.

“I chose film because it is a great format for the old generation to return to, and relive, a historical moment in their lives in a completely new way; you can see the world moving and be in that world.”

Burucúa’s documentary project, 1967: Canada Welcomes the World, is a visual ode to Expo 67 through a series of archival images and short documentaries focused on the national pavilions of the 60 participating countries. The project debuted last year at the Oakville and Elgin County museums as part of their sesquicentennial efforts.

Expo 67, according to Burucúa, was a perfect opportunity for many countries – some with their newfound sense of identity and confidence – to present themselves to the world. Each country did so by exhibiting its arts and crafts and advances in science and technology.

That also held true for Canada.

“It was setting itself up for a big change that also coincided with its centennial celebrations,” Burucúa said.

Expo 67 captured a new spirit of national identity. In fact, the aim, according to its official documents, was “to provide an explanation of the world to each and every one of its visitors.” For Canada, it was an invitation, rich with optimism for the future.

“There is a direct link between 1967 and 2017,” Burucúa said. “I live in the suburbs, which have a stereotypical image of uniformity. Believe me, that’s not true. All the different families and cultures I see here are the direct result of the cultural wealth inaugurated in 1967. We are a consequence of that today.”

Burucúa spent more than two-and-a-half years researching and collaborating on this project with her husband, documentary filmmaker Juan Andrés Bello.

“One of my fondest memories is one week my husband and I spent at Library and Archives Canada, which coincidentally was inaugurated in 1967,” Burucúa said. “It was like a treasure hunt.” Together, they browsed through photos – she looked through 5,000 images daily – archival footage, promotional material and architectural drawings, all related to Expo 67.

“Everyone who grew up in that era, from 5-year-olds to teenagers, has a memory of Expo 67. People who attended the exhibition or found the project’s Instagram page have since provided memorabilia from when they (or their relatives) attended. I love how generous people are with sharing these materials,” she continued.

The work also produced a spin-off piece. Rebecca Bugg, an undergraduate student volunteering with the project, also made her own short documentary, Hello, Canada, based on archival images Burucúa unearthed. Funded by Western’s Canada 150 Student Fund, the project recently received the Award of Commendation at the Canada Shorts Film Festival and the Award of Merit at the Headline International Film Festival.

“Young people nowadays relate to short audio-visual formats. This project is presenting the age-old question of national identity to the current generation in a new way – if, among them, there are future academics who want to study it further, even better,” Burucúa said.

Pioneering direction in Down syndrome research

As an undergraduate student, Nicole Neil helped change the life of a young boy with autism.

She found textbook concepts came to life as she worked with him. Now an Education professor at Western, she remembers real life intersecting with classroom learning: “I was directly applying what I had learned about behavioural intervention and psychology from class in real life,” she said.

“After a session or two, he was able to tie shoelaces on his own, or make himself a sandwich. You could see these skills, that we take for granted, developing right in front of your eyes,” she said.

Much of the work she did with the boy was guided by an early life intervention therapy known as Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), which uses knowledge of how we learn and behave to help mitigate developmental disabilities. It’s been shown to be effective among children along the autism spectrum.

Now, Neil is one of a handful of North American researchers to pioneer the use of ABA for children with Down syndrome. In Ontario, one of every 750 babies is born with this genetic disorder, which can lead to a variety of developmental disabilities that (much like autism) can include social isolation, self-injury and attention deficits.

Neil, who is also a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst, is working with several families in London and across Ontario. As with the boy from her undergraduate experience, Neil is once again applying research concepts from books to real life – a textbook example of shaping lives. In turn, her clinical work is helping shape her research.

“The first thing parents of children with Down syndrome ask me when I mention ABA is: ‘what is it?’” She added she is “simply taking the already-proven principles of ABA and applying them to under-represented populations.”

A typical ABA session begins with an interaction between a therapist and a child, whose responses and behaviours reflect personality traits, skill-levels, needs and interests. The therapist then analyzes these behaviours and applies therapies to help improve the child’s quality of life.

Its flexibility makes ABA one of the most effective approaches available for children with autism.

“There is simply a greater awareness around the needs of children with autism,” Neil said. As a result, parents are often more familiar with the most effective treatment options than are parents of children with Down syndrome.

One of ABA’s strengths is its customizability: instead of the typical one-size-fits-all approach, the tool allows Neil to tailor intervention strategies specific to each child. For example, she can tweak the intensity of each intervention, the pace at which it’s delivered and the number of sessions required weekly. These interventions help improve a variety of skills, such as language and social communication.

Neil’s pioneering work with parents, children and therapists will be critical in raising awareness of ABA’s effectiveness. A useful outcome, she said, would be policy changes at a provincial level, including funding for ABA sessions for people with developmental disabilities. Those lacking community support and effective intervention strategies often end up in inpatient units, for example, which costs Ontario taxpayers more than $1,500 a day.

Moving beyond Down syndrome and autism, she sees a future in which ABA is widely applied, from helping address behavioural issues by senior citizens in nursing homes to helping students address pre-exam jitters.

Using arts as a way to manage waste

By showing them beauty in waste, Western Education professor Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is nurturing the next generation of creative problem-solvers.

“Our children will inherit the land we live on, the water we drink, and the air we breathe,” she said. “They will also inherit a 21st-century problem – the unmanageable growth of waste, which threatens to compromise their health and pollute the environment.”

As a result, Pacini-Ketchabaw believes teachers and educators need to rethink ways to teach waste-management practices and environmental studies at school. This will allow them to better equip the next generation to solve environmental problems. As an example, the conventional approach of the six ‘Rs’ (reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, remediate and repair) “takes waste out of sight and out of mind,” Pacini-Ketchabaw said, adding that this omission can make waste-management practices ineffective or, in some cases, worsen the waste crisis.

Pacini-Ketchabaw was one of 102 Western researchers who received funding from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership, Partnership Development, Insight and Insight Development grant programs announced last week. SSHRC invested $7,218,803 in these programs at Western this year.

To support their efforts, the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, announced Friday more than $265 million in funding for over 3,300 social sciences and humanities research projects across Canada. The funding is being awarded through scholarships, fellowships, and grants from SSHRC, one of the three federal granting councils responsible for supporting researchers whose work helps fuel a stronger economy, healthy communities and a growing middle class.

Pacini-Ketchabaw takes an unconventional hands-on approach. In her world, a piece of garbage is not a wasted opportunity, but a moment for young children to understand how waste materials have a transformation of their own. With the support of a SSHRC Insight Grant worth $170,076 over three years, Pacini-Ketchabaw will work with a team of educators, artists, researchers and children in Canada, Australia and Ecuador to determine the best ways to engage children and the arts to tackle the waste crisis and pioneer more effective ways to teach the six ‘Rs’ in schools.

Rather than teach children to simply throw waste away without thinking about its consequences, Pacini-Ketchabaw wants to use arts-based visual methods to harness the inherent curiosity and creativity of young children to make them comfortable with waste material. Children will work with various artists to understand the transformation of waste material like plastic to, essentially, think about waste in creative and novel ways.

Pacini-Ketchabaw hopes that the process of creating art out of waste will change children’s perception of waste material, which will be critical to eventually creating sustainable, environmentally friendly solutions for waste management.

Throughout the project, Pacini-Ketchabaw plans to conduct such outreach initiatives as public and online art exhibitions, film screenings, and blogs.

“Public engagement in this research will be critical,” she said. “The general public should be aware of the fragility of our dependence on the environment, and the need to mitigate the health, social and environmental risks of escalating waste.”