Western University researchers earned a total of nearly $9.8 million in new Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants supporting innovative research across disciplines. The July 21 funding announcement highlights more than $289 million in federal support for research projects and partnerships across Canada.
Nearly $6.5 million in SSHRC Insight Grants - supporting research excellence in the social sciences and humanities - was awarded to Western scholars, plus $3.3 million in Insight Development Grants, which foster research in its initial stages. Western attracted 46 Insight Development Grants across six faculties. The $6.5 million in Insight Grants, which represents a 72 per cent increase in funding to Western compared to 2025, will fund two- to five-year research projects into topics ranging from loneliness, democratic participation, international law, Canadian culture and feminist history.
Reshaping patriarchal views of art
For centuries, women's work has been dismissed, minimized or labeled unserious. Yet women artists have continued to challenge convention and reshape culture. Western music history professor Emily Abrams Ansari believes few Canadians embody that legacy more powerfully than composer Ann Southam.
Ansari's funded project, Music, Feminism, Crafting and Southam's Women's World, explores the life and legacy of the Toronto composer, whose contribution to Canadian culture remains relatively unknown despite her significant impact on the country's musical landscape.
Southam found new ways to represent feminist ideas in her music. According to Ansari, she sought to imitate "women's work" in her compositions. That includes repetitive tasks of domestic life - such as cooking, cleaning, spinning, embroidery and knitting - and the tasks associated with crafting.
"We all carry within us a masculine view on what great art is. Southam's resistance is unique - she focused on crafts, for so long dismissed as trivial because they were women's," Ansari said.
Emily Abrams Ansari
Ansari's project will study how patriarchal power structures influence the music industry through the composition of Southam's music, her life as a queer feminist coming up in the 1960s, her work as an organizer of the Association of Women Composers Canada and how music and crafting can work in dialogue with one another.
Ansari received over $115,000, one of 28 Western researchers across seven faculties to have projects funded through the latest SSHRC Insight Grants.
Alongside student research assistants and postdoctoral scholars, Ansari will publish research papers reflecting Southam's resistance, as well as a website and two books that make Southam's story accessible to public audiences. The first book will be a non-academic account of Southam's life and legacy, while the second will be an edited volume of articles exploring the intersections between music and crafting.
She'll further investigate those links at a festival symposium; a fall event organized in collaboration with Tricia Johnson and Sheri Nault from Western's visual arts department. Planned for September in the Don Wright Faculty of Music, the festival aims to connect music scholars, visual arts scholars, artists, musicians and scholars from other fields through academic presentations, music and community events.
"Southam's story is really compelling and shouldn't just reach an audience of academics," Ansari said. "I want her very interesting life to be known about more broadly."
Ansari's SSHRC funding will support the salaries of graduate student assistants and fund travel. She will visit Southam's archives in Banff, Alta., conduct interviews and study relevant queer history archives in Toronto.
At a moment when Canadians are rethinking sovereignty amid U.S. President Donald Trump's threats of a "51st state," Ansari's project prioritizes making Canadian art accessible. She hopes that in highlighting Southam's work, she inspires further research on Canadian women artists.
"With the complicated position Canada is in right now, it's important for Canada to self-differentiate culturally and celebrate what makes us different, especially from the United States." - Emily Abrams Ansari, professor of music history
Understanding international law and sovereignty
Sovereignty is also central to the research of Western Law professor and co-director of Western's Public and Private International Law Research Group (PPIL), Ryan Liss. His SSHRC-funded project, Rethinking International Crime: Crimes Against the Sovereign Order, examines how sovereignty has shaped the development of international criminal law.
Ryan Liss
Liss's project aims to understand how and why international criminal law has changed over time, including how it has shaped and been shaped by the concept of state sovereignty - what it means for a political community to govern itself.
He will study the origins of international criminal law to better understand how it should function. He hopes to inform a more robust world order that better secures people's rights.
"I want to understand how we might structure a world in which all people can coexist respectfully. That starts with how a given state structures its legal and political systems at home to uphold the rights of those who live there. But no state exists in isolation. So we also need to think about how we might organize an international system in which every state can serve that same role - securing the rights of individuals within that community," said Liss.
His SSHRC grant of over $100,000 will support archival research and a fellowship at The University of Oxford in the U.K. Next year, Liss will be the Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow at Oxford's Balliol College where he will engage with other experts in law, philosophy and history and present his work in a series of public lectures to the Oxford community.
Loneliness and political identity
Collective life is shaped not only by relationships between countries, but also by the relationships between the citizens themselves and their government. What happens when those connections weaken is at the heart of political science professor Laura Stephenson's project: The Political Consequences of Loneliness.
"Being lonely doesn't just mean you don't have friends or you don't have anywhere to go. It means that there is some degree of connection you want that you don't have." - Laura Stephenson, professor of political science
Stephenson received over $400,000 from SSHRC to investigate how individuals respond to loneliness and how it may affect their political views. Her previous research on the epidemic of loneliness shows that loneliness has shifted the political landscape.
Laura Stephenson
Governments internationally are acting against loneliness; the U.K. implemented the world's first government-sponsored anti-loneliness strategy in 2018, introducing a Minister for Loneliness. Japan adopted the same in 2021 to tackle the country's COVID-19 related mental health crisis.
Stephenson's project examines the two main mechanisms activated by loneliness: a desire to create connections or hypervigilance that leads to further isolation.
The five-year grant will support cross-national surveys, experiments and a study of post-secondary students to determine the effects of loneliness on trust in government and political preferences.
"Our goal is to better understand the connection between feelings of loneliness and attitudes related to government and politics, as well as what governments can do - or shouldn't do - to break that connection," said Stephenson.
Learn more about how Western is navigating new realities.
