Research and Public Education: The Two Dimensions of the Project

Funding for this project was governed by two sets of priorities.  The Status of Women grant was primarily geared towards producing original research, while the Canadian Heritage grant was more oriented towards public education and outreach.

By combining these two sets of priorities, the project was able to:

respond to the interests and concerns of researchers, four of whom are university-based and a fifth who is community-based;

respond to the broader concerns and needs of various communities across Atlantic Canada, especially the need of combining knowledge about the recent laws and policies and their effects on communities and people, as the latter engage in practicing citizenship by participating in open discussion about such effects, and in the process providing the government valuable policy information from a community perspective;

address academic research and public education not as polar opposites but indeed nodal points in a continuum of knowledge production. Public education involves research. Similarly, social science (especially) research without knowledge mobilization and dissemination in communities of interest (both lay and policy ones) has become less relevant. This has also increasingly been the position of research councils, such as SSHRC, in recent years.  SSHRC’s transformation process from “funding council” to “knowledge council” illustrates the importance of such a continuum of knowledge;

fulfill both funders’ mandates, enriching their respective research and public education priorities in the process.