More News from FIMS

Successful Defenses

Uche Ikenyei, HIS PhD candidate, successfully defended his doctoral thesis titled, Improving Developing Countries’ Health Information Systems Capacity for Infectious Disease Pandemic Responses: A Case Study of the Ebola Virus Disease and the Coronavirus Disease Pandemics, on December 15, 2021.

Tanaz Javan, HIS PhD candidate, successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled, Organizational Implementation of Trauma and Violence Informed Care, on February 28, 2022.

Marc Resendes, MHIS candidate, successfully defended his thesis titled, Examining public health risk communication via social media by provincial and local health authorities in Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic, on November 21, 2021.

Stephanie Simpson, HIS PhD candidate, successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled, Implementing Health Impact Assessment as a Required Component of Government Policymaking: A Multi-Level Exploration of the Determinants of Healthy Public Policy, on February 14, 2022.

Anita Slominska, HIS PhD candidate, successfully defended their doctoral thesis titled, The Hepatic Happening: Confronting Waitlist Death in Liver Transplantation on March 11, 2022.

David Walugembe, PhD in HIS candidate, successfully defended his doctoral thesis titled, Exploring variations in the implementation of a health systems level policy intervention to improve maternal and child health, on October 22, 2021.

Aidan Warlow, MA Media Studies candidate, successfully defended his thesis titled, Radiant Dreams and Nuclear Nightmares: Japanese Resistance Narratives and American Intervention in Postwar Speculative Popular Culture on February 11, 2022.

News & Announcements

FIMS welcomes new postdoctoral scholar
Adriana Alas (El Colegio de Michoacán in Mexico) began a multi-year appointment as a postdoctoral scholar at Western University in March 2022, working collaboratively with Associate Professor Amanda Grzyb and the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador team. For more on Alas and her research, read the FIMS news piece "Researcher from El Salvador to join FIMS as Postdoctoral Scholar" published on February 7, 2022.

Angela Sterritt announced as 2022 FIMS Asper Fellow
In January FIMS welcomed Angela Sterritt, an award-winning multimedia journalist, author and visual artist as the 2022 FIMS Asper Fellow. A member of the Gitxsan nation, Sterritt is based in Vancouver and has worked at the CBC since 2003. She brought an enormous wealth of expertise and experience to the appointment and was an invaluable resource for FIMS graduate students over the winter term. More information about Sterritt's appointment as Asper Fellow can be found in the FIMS article, "Angela Sterritt announced as 2022 FIMS Asper Fellow."

Awards & Accomplishments

FIMS instructor Juan Bello was awarded a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts (Explore and Create program: Concept to Realization) to produce The Telenovela Archives, a web-based project documenting the production of serialized fiction during the early years of television in Latin America (1950-1969).

Bello also produced The Chalatenango Massacres, a documentary project that was selected for the Festival international du film d'histoire de Montréal [Montreal International History Film Festival - FIFHM]. The project was produced in collaboration with the Sumpul Association, and with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts (two consecutive grants: Research and Creation, and Concept to Realization), and the London Arts Council (Community Arts Investment Program). The online program will be available starting May 18, 2022.

Jacquelyn Burkell, Daniel Robinson, and Romayne Smith Fullerton were promoted to the rank of Professor  in January 2022.

FIMS faculty member Nafiz Shuva was named the winner of the Fall 2021 Fantastic FIMS award, and MLIS students Kate McCandless & Wilson Poulter were jointly announced as the winners of the Spirit of Librarianship award.

HIS PhD candidate Danica Facca was elected as SOGS 2022-2023 president, and will begin her tenure in May 2022.

LIS PhD candidate Hugh Samson was elected to the University Senate for the July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023 term.

Media Studies PhD candidate Effie Sapridis has been elected to the Western Board of Governors and will represent the Graduate Student constituency for two years starting in July 2022.

MIT student Rubaina Singla is one of four Western students named to the 2022 cohort of The Cansbridge Fellowship program, and joins only 175 Canadian students selected to join the prestigious fellowship since its inception in 2011.

Assistant Professor and CRC Sarah Smith and her collaborator Kirsty Robertson, Associate Professor of Visual Art and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies, have received a Strategic Priorities Fund award from Western University for their project, Teaching and Sharing Strategies for Sustainability in the Museums Sector. Affiliated with the Visual Art Department’s Centre for Sustainable Curating, the project explores the reduction of the museum sector’s carbon footprint.

Romayne Smith Fullerton has been awarded a Faculty Scholar appointment (2022-24). The appointment celebrates significant recent scholarly achievements in teaching, research or service/leadership. Smith Fullerton's award recognizes her ongoing work on comparative crime reporting, including the recently-published monograph (with Maggie Jones Patterson) Murder in our Midst: Comparing Crime Coverage Ethics in an Age of Globalized News (Oxford, 2021).

Assistant Professor Luke Stark has been awarded an SSHRC Insight Development Grant for his project, The Political Economy of Emotion AI. More information can be found in the article "Can machines really read our emotions? Funding secured for research into the usefulness of emotion AI."

Publications

LIS PhD candidate Michael Ridley recently published the chapter "Machine Information Behaviour" in The Rise of AI: Implications and Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

Associate Professor & Assistant Dean (Research) Daniel Robinson published the following chapter:

D. Robinson, "Imperial Tobacco Canada and Health Reassurance Cigarette Marketing during the 1970s," in Charlene Elliott and Joshua Greenberg, eds., Communication and Health: Media, Marketing, and Risk (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 123-141.

Additional Activities of Note

FIMS instructor Juan Bello produced the documentary Never Forgotten, which tells the story of the on the On-To-Ottawa Trek, a historical event of great repercussion in the history of organized labour movements in Canada. A web-based version of the project, including the documentary, images, documents, and a series of educational resources is now available to the public at https://www.ontoottawatrek.ca/.

Associate Professor Amanda Grzyb co-hosted a conversation with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, "Confronting Hate: Artistic Responses to History, Genocide and Rising-Right Wing Nationalism" with City Lights Bookshop in London, Ontario on January 26, 2022. Kwiatkowski is a Polish poet, musician, and lead singer of the internationally acclaimed art-rock band Trupa Trupa. The recording of the conversation can be watched here.

Faculty member Mark Kearney recently signed a contract with American publisher BearManor Media for the biography he’s writing of Al Christie, a silent film pioneering director who was born and raised in London, Ont. The book is scheduled for publication in 2023. In 1911, Christie directed the first-ever comedy film in the town of Hollywood. Five years later, Christie set up his own studio in Hollywood and produced hundreds of short films through the 1910s and 1920s. He died in 1951 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

 A Q&A with Professor Sharon Sliwinski on the Guardians of Sleep podcast is available on the FIMS website, along with podcast episodes and details about the project's origins. Sliwinski is the creator and editor of the Museum of Dreams, partnering with the Museum of London (UK) and the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London to collect and curate Londoner's (UK) pandemic dreams for The Guardians of Sleep.

Canada Research Chair in Art, Culture and Global Relations (Tier 2) Sarah Smith co-curated From Remote Stars: Buckminster Fuller, London, and Speculative Futures, a major exhibition at Museum London running until May 15, 2022. The exhibition looks architect R. Buckminster Fuller's 1968 ideas of a techno-utopian future of the planet he calls Spaceship Earth, and explores how yesterday’s inspiration for a sustainable planet has evolved into today’s complex reality of global interdependence, big data, artificial intelligence and climate change.