For the second straight year, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Northern BC has earned a prestigious national research award.
Dr. Vanessa Sloan Morgan has received a Banting Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. With it comes $70,000 a year in funding for up to two years of research.
Sloan Morgan’s research explores how youth voices can be centered in community-engaged research and decision making to shape more environmentally, economically, and socially desirable futures.
“We’re taking a more youth-led approach meaning the youth actually design the questions that we’re going to be talking about, the design how we go about doing it, how it can incorporated with work they are already doing in their school districts or around their communities,” explains Sloan Morgan.
“This approach really ensures that the youth are the ones defining how we go forward.”
Sloan Morgan’s project is called Inheritors of the Future: Community-Driven Voices of Youth Contemplating Resource Extraction of Indigenous and Northern Geographies in British Columbia.
“Facilitating conversations on how environment, community, and health intersect and how things like research extraction and the accumulative impacts of research extraction can impact communities in the north,” she says.
“But more importantly, seeing how the youth are experiencing decision making in their community, how they’d like to move forward, and if they’d like to be engaged in the broader questions facing everybody in northern British Columbia.”
Sloan Morgan’s award is one of just 70 Banting Fellowships awarded across Canada.
The two previous UNBC postdoctoral researchers to earn a Banting Fellowship are Dr. Maya Gislason (2013) and Dr. Alison Gerlach (2017).