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Dr. Wriglesworth is currently editing a book of selected letters between Jane Kenyon, Alice Mattison, and Joyce Peseroff. Ìý

This project focuses on capturing the history of the students, faculty, and alumni of St. Jerome’s College during the First World War. Using war records, newspapers, student newspapers, and other primary documents, the researcher intends to create a repository that showcases the rich history of members of our community who served in the First World War.

I am seeking seed funding to help prepare a SSHRC Connection grant aimed at hosting a three-day workshop and open-access tool: the Conference and Ontology on Restoration Ecology (CORE). The workshop will establish the ontology to deal with the influx of big data across a number of identified academic disciplines.

Canada, like other nations, is taking significant steps to address the global biodiversity crisis. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework commits to placing thirty per cent of federal lands under active restoration by 2030. Despite these important measures, evidence of ecosystem restoration remains locked away in peer-reviewed scholarly publications, or, worse, hidden in the filing cabinets of consultants and not-for-profit agencies. The research exists, but Ìýit is difficult to access. This poses an acute challenge for restoration and conservation within the social sciences, fields of research that involve interfacing with policymakers and community members about natural environments. With more than 75% of land areas classified as severely degraded by the UN, this work has never been more urgent.

CORE brings together an interdisciplinary group of environmental historians, historical ecologists, restoration ecologists, and conservation practitioners and researchers to shape a cohesive knowledge base that will underpin open data in the field and bridge restoration and conservation social science and ecological science. This Connection project brings forth a truly transdisciplinary effort that will result in an output capable of connecting currently siloed deposits of ecological knowledge.

University students in Canada are experiencing a mental health crisis, with increased reports of psychological distress, mental illness, and poor well-being (Linden et al., 2021; Moghimi et al., 2023). One approach to addressing mental health challenges is through the implementation of peer support programs. Prior studies have demonstrated that participation in peer support programs is associated with increased mental health and well-being (Drysdale et al., 2022; Richard et al., 2022). However, there are limitations of structured peer support programs, especially when being targeted at student populations. University students often experience competing demands with respect to their time, meaning that they struggle to commit to consistently attending programs over a prolonged period of time (Sprung & Rogers, 2021). As a result, their ability to experience the full benefits of these evidence-based programs is not guaranteed (Byrom, 2018).

Given the limitations of structured peer-support programs, the current mixed methods study is designed to investigate the efficacy of an unstructured drop-in peer support program for university students’ mental health and well-being.

This project is the first phase of a new direction in my research. My lived experience providing labour-intensive eldercare has prompted an interest in caregiving, particularly the care involved for people living with dementia. As I have taken initial steps toward developing a research agenda in this area, I have determined two key areas of focus:

1. Care narratives. I have begun researching narratives of eldercare, primarily memoir and autofiction. I have prior research experience in the field of autobiography, and I have published work on medieval life writing, so this direction has felt like a natural outgrowth of my work on language, rhetoric, and narrative.
2. Care futures. Dementia is a much-feared diagnosis, and the number of people living with dementia is increasing as the global population ages. Many experts predict a care deficit in years to come, and even now, infrastructures of care are often inadequate or inaccessible (the COVID-19 pandemic both exposed and exacerbated these gaps). I’ve been given an opportunity to collaborate with interdisciplinary researchers on the future of dementia care, and my role as a humanities scholar and a caregiver equips me with a unique perspective and capacity to contribute.

Using an existing data set, I will produce a manuscript to submit for publication in a scholarly journal describing a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) of the Perceptions of Sex Offenders (PSO) scale (Harper & Hogue, 2016). This instrument is thought to have three subscales:

1. Sentencing & Management - how society should deal with those who offend sexually;
2. Stereotype Endorsement - beliefs about the kind of person who offends sexually; and
3. Risk perception - ideas about danger (or lack thereof) posed by sex offenders).Ìý

CFA will indicate whether the aforementioned data set fits this three-factor model. Further scale validation information will be provided by calculating correlations between PSO total score and the 3 PSO subscales with restorative justice principles and other relevant constructs, as well as presenting internal consistency and descriptive statistics. Validation of standardized instruments is crucial for development of a solid body of research. Given that the PSO is gaining popularity in the scholarly investigation of attitudes toward people who offend sexually, psychometric analysis is warranted.