Current

BURC-SSHRC Research Grant: “Burning Relations: Fire, Vulnerability, and Responsibility in Contemporary Francophone Literature” ($4, 993)

A growing number of contemporary Francophone literary texts mobilize fire in ways that expose conceptual breaches and invite further research. One of them emerges from the recurring metaphor of a « communauté de brûlé·es » (a community of the burned), where fire operates as a shared mark, memory, and political horizon for subjects shaped by trauma, weaponized care, and collective struggle. In the texts I have currently identified, fire is not only a sign of devastation; it becomes a generative, galvanizing, and relational force capable of building solidarity, producing counter-narratives, and sustaining ethical and political attention. This ambivalent figure, at once destructive and protective, wounding and empowering, opens a significant line of inquiry into how contemporary literature in French mobilizes fire to think resistance, interdependence, and future-making. This project expands existing scholarship on fire in literature by theorizing it as a literary, affective, and political operator in recent feminist, ecofeminist, and decolonial writing in Québec, where care and combustion are co-constitutive conditions of survival and world-building.

BURC-SSHRC Research Grant:  “Co-Creating Pedagogies and Communities of Care across Disciplines”

($4,994, P.I. Dr Gretta Sayers, co-applicant with Dr. Mousumi Majumber, Dr. Laura Van Mulligen)

This initial research project, enriched by the unique perspectives of an interdisciplinary collaboration of academics from Brandon University, delves into the issues surrounding cultures of care in academia. Through interdisciplinary research–care is transversal and cannot be adequately understood within the confines of only one discipline–and the creation of a Community of Practice (CoP), we seek to address the complex cultures and tensions of care within academia to shed light on how care manifests (or doesn’t) within its many spaces and relations to further investigate teaching and learning strategies that can foster an environment where all can thrive. In its first stage, this project allows the PI and co-applicants to engage, with nuance, in real-world issues by shifting focus from discipline-centric to problem-centric research through varied collaborative research methods. The creation of such a CoP will allow us to better circumscribe the multifaceted power dynamics of care within post-secondary education as well as foster mutual critical, theoretical, and pedagogical engagements in alignment with the cultures of care we envision, in an effort to resist the myths of individualism and independence on which current dominant Western academic models thrive.

Past

2026 (BURCSSHRC) Knowledge Mobilization Grant “Le care intraduisible? Genre, traduction et pouvoir linguistique” (Untranslatable care? Gender, translation and linguistic power), $2K

2023 (BURC-SSHRC) Research Grant, Project “The Poetics and Politics of the Ordinary in Francophone Literary Texts,” 4 486 $

2021 (BURC-SSHRC) New Faculty Research Grant, Project “The Costs of Care: Relational Struggle and Defiant Voices in Contemporary Poetry by Women in Québec,” $ 5 205.31