News
May Farrales and Mariam Georgis receive SSHRC Insight Development Grants
SFU Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies faculty members May Farrales and Mariam Georgis are leading research funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Farrales and Georgis have each been awarded SSHRC Insight Development Grants, a program fostering the development of new research questions and the exploration of innovative methods, approaches, and ideas.
Finding Place: Filipino youth and belonging in northern British Columbia
May Farrales
With Filipino communities burgeoning in northern British Columbia, so too are questions about their sense of belonging. Recently, the Government of Canada reported that immigrants in Alberta and BC feel lower levels of belonging than immigrants in other provinces. This trend signals potential problems, as the report notes, since one’s sense of belonging correlates to their well-being and to general social cohesion.
Despite the converging issues of racism, belonging, and well-being that affects racialized immigrant youth in northern BC, there is a lack of information and paucity of scholarship attending to the particularities of their experiences. Using an arts-based qualitative narrative approach, the project aims to understand Filipino youth’s experiences of belonging -- identifying the barriers they face and the systems of support they draw on and need in navigating a sense of belonging in the communities their parents have migrated to, and where they are growing up.
Innovating an Assyrian Indigenous Feminist Framework: Decolonial Conceptualizations of Nationhood and Sovereignty
Mariam Georgis
Since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the ensuing occupation, and decades of ‘democratic nation-building', scholars have been debating the possible dissolution of the Iraqi state between the three major power blocs: Shi’a and Sunni Arabs and Kurds. This debate has occurred with little attention to minoritized communities, particularly those Indigenous to the areas claimed by the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
The overall goal of this research is to deepen and globalize our understanding of Indigeneity and colonialism by looking at the southwest Asian (Middle East) context, focusing on Kurdish forms of colonial erasures and appropriation of Assyrian heritage in the occupation of Assyrian land. Specifically, Georgis will develop an Assyrian Indigenous feminist framework for analyzing contemporary Indigenous struggles for self-determination in Iraq placing Indigenous feminism from the North American context in conversation with Assyrian Indigenous feminism.
Learn more about research initiatives at SFU GSWS.