Mount Saint Vincent University's Strategic Plan, Blueprint 2000, and Strategic Research Plan specify Human Development as one of the university's three strategic research areas. Human Development research is conceptualized broadly to encompass inquiry and scholarship concerned with the human life course, its attributes, challenges, context and conditions. Arguably, the other two strategic areas identified by the Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) Strategic Research Plan, Women and Gender and Technology Enhanced Learning, are intersected dynamically and substantively with the human development research theme. Indeed, human development represents an established, mature, and reputationally important area of research and scholarship achievement within the MSVU community. MSVU human development-focused research and scholarship is represented in areas as diverse as foundational processes (e.g., cognition, biological/physical development, language), identity formation and socio-cultural dynamics (e.g., gender, women, family/youth studies, history, and education), applied issues (e.g., care-giving, parenting styles, literacy, nutrition and health), and public policy processes (e.g., family/child/youth support, community-based services, and aging). Furthermore, MSVU's decision to locate three Canada Research Chairs in the areas of Aging (Tier IICRC), Technology Enhanced Learning (Tier I CRC) and Family and Youth Studies (Tier I CRC) underscores the university research community's achievements in intersecting areas associated with human development-focused research and scholarship, as well as the university's commitment to build on and to enhance its reputation, expertise, and impact with regard to these areas of research and scholarship. The human development theme also engages research and scholarship ranging from traditional academic discipline-based inquiry (e.g., history, biology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and political science); through integrated programmes (e.g., women's studies, education, peace and conflict studies, family/child/youth studies, and gerontology); to applied initiatives (e.g., aging, care-giving, policy studies, and business).
General Objectives
With the assistance of SSHRC's Aid to Small Universities Grant (ASU), MSVU proposes to establish a Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Human Development (CIRHD}. CIRHD will assist the MSVU research community to foster and to collaborate in new intra- and inter-university interdisciplinary research initiatives. In so doing, CIRHD will build on the successes and lessons derived from previous ASU's to address substantively an identified need. While MSVU houses considerable and accomplished human development research expertise, few initiatives to date have been targeted on mobilizing this expertise's interdisciplinary research potentials and capacities. Arguably, sustaining MSVU's expertise and assisting its movement to the next level of engagement and impact will benefit from explicitly targeting interdisciplinary initiatives for dedicated resource support.
As is the situation in most contemporary universities, MSVU's human development research theme encompasses researchers and scholars situated in a wide variety of academic, professional, and applied departments and programmes. While several programmes are notably interdisciplinary in design and many of their faculty seasoned interdisciplinary scholars, other key MSVU academic discipline and professional programme scholars and researchers continue to work, as is to be expected, mainly within the bounds of their disciplines' theoretical, conceptual and methodological frameworks and concerns.
CIRHD will provide encouragement and support for new, more inclusive, initiatives that enable MSVU scholars to develop and to lead interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research collaborations. It is anticipated that collaboration will stimulate the development of interdisciplinary research initiatives which mobilize discipline-seated conceptual and research design/methodologies strengths and practices. These initiatives will propose and apply new and promising approaches to the study and understanding of pressing human development issues. For instance, MSVU's considerable research strengths in areas such as women, gender, gerontology, and family/child and youth studies will realize enhanced research impacts through the CIRHD initiative. CIRHD will enable the development of more targeted interdisciplinary strategies for the study and understanding of critical topic areas such as sexuality and the elderly, the intersection of gendered identities and aging, women's educational success and parenting styles/family dynamics (e.g., social capital), family/youth-targeted social policy analyses, aging and HIV, globalization and the political economy/political ecology of family relations/gendered identities, immigration and ethnic studies, and the intersection of educational technologies with learning styles and educational outcomes. These are but a few examples of potential research enquiries that will benefit considerably from interdisciplinary collaborations and approaches.
CIRHD is a new thematic initiative proposed to SSHRCC's Aid to Small Universities Grant programme. With the assistance requested, MSVU intends through building on its strengths to develop CIRHD as an institutionally designating locus for interdisciplinary research initiatives. As such, this proposal diverges from the previous MSVU Aid to Small Universities grant application theme (Women and Gender), and represents a new emphasis and direction that are intended to embody and further MSVU's research strengths and strategic intentions through encouraging and supporting faculty research interests. Notably, the CIRHD is understood as arising from and expressing MSVU's traditional commitment to research, scholarship, and learning associated with the core themes such as women and gender, particularly as these have been expressed in and supported by the 2001 Aid to Small Universities grant application. The CIRHD concept advances the prospect of innovative research initiatives through its specific intention to foster conceptual and methodological interdisciplinarity. Such an initiative will further enable the creative intersection of MSVU's women and gender research strengths with those housed in departments such as Child and Youth Studies, Family Studies and Gerontology, Education, as well as within the more traditional academic disciplines such as Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, History, and English.
Strategic Plan and Activities
The CIRHD will foster interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaboration and research through initiatives such as:
• support for as many as two strategically important working seminars per year over the grant period that are designed to generate interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches in concept and research design to the study of human development issues and concerns;
• support for as many as two workshops per year led by interdisciplinary research experts wherein MSVU faculty will be offered opportunities to advance their understandings of the ways and means to build effective interdisciplinary research collaborations;
• support for the timely development of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary research proposals intended for submission to external funding competitions that may arise from the aforementioned working seminars and workshops;
• support for collaborative, pilot research studies designed to foster and to test interdisciplinary research designs and methodologies as a key, initial step in the development of proposals for submission to external funding competitions;
• support for one or two smaller scale interdisciplinary and collaborative research projects that address pressing human development social policy issues;
• support for MSVU-lead inter-university human development interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research initiatives and research proposals; and,
• support for interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary research team non-standard, innovative research-levered, knowledge dissemination.
Governance and Process
To this end, C1RHD will encourage and invite MSVU research faculty to submit proposals on a bi-annual basis (by October 15 or March 15 of each fiscal year) to the CIRHD Steering Committee. The committee will assess proposals on the basis of their potential to foster innovative interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, human development-focused, research. Of particuiar concern to adjudication will be the potentials of the research and/or activity proposed to foster collaborative initiatives likely to result in the development of proposals for submission to external research funds competitions. Additionally, CIRHD Steering Committee adjudications will attach particular weight to considerations such as opportunities for student formation and participation, as well as demonstrated achievement of outcomes from previously funded research. The CIRHD Steering Committee will be chaired by MSVU's Associate Vice-President-Research (or designate) and composed of no fewer than four of MSVU's research faculty.
CIRHD Strategic Development
MSVU intends to employ SSHRC's Aid to Small University grant to more precisely define and locate within its community human development-focused interdisciplinary research initiatives and strengths. The proposed allocation of resources emphasizes support for activities that build on and from these strengths to foster research capacity that will be positioned to compete for external to MSVU resources. While fostering funding success from within national research council competitions will remain a primary goal, CIRHD will position MSVU faculty to explore funded research opportunities within settings such as provincial and federal government departments, foundations, NGOs, development assistance agencies, private businesses, and world governance bodies (e.g., UNESCO, WHO). As proposed, MSVU's CIRHD initiative specifically satisfies SSHRC concern that the Aid to Small Universities grant be employed creatively to further research excellence through development of research centres embodying the university's resident strengths and potentials. The CIRHD initiative offers the prospect of supporting MSVU's research development through focusing resident strengths while enabling the initiatives holding the potential to move MSVU's research capacity and reputation to anew level of innovation, accomplishment, and achievement.