CISS Names Faculty Research Grant Recipients
The Center is pleased to announce the recipients of 2021-22 Faculty Research Pilot Grants.
Daryl Ireland (STH and CGCM; pictured left) and Eugenio Menegon (History/CAS; pictured right). The Future of Sino-Western Relations is in their Past.
The grant will support the expansion of the China Historical Christian Database (CHCD), a platform which provides users the tools to discover where every Christian church, school, hospital, lab, museum, orphanage, publishing house, and other important locations were situated in China. The expansion of this resource will document who worked inside those buildings, both foreign and Chinese. Collectively, this information creates spatial maps and generates global relational networks that reveal where, when, and how Western ideas, technologies, and practices entered China. Simultaneously, it uncovers how and through whom Chinese ideas, technologies, and practices moved West. This project will break new ground in providing quantifiable data about Sino-Western relations. The general public can interact with the data through an intuitive website, while advanced users can download the CHCD’s data for computational modes of analysis. The funds will be used to support undergraduate and graduate research assistants as they embark on a three-month data mining operation that will generate more than 100,000 new points of information, to dig deeper into collections and materials to find the people, places, organizations, and events that connected China and the West.
Makarand Mody (SHA). Moving from Precarity Towards Prosperity: An Abductive Analysis of Precarity Management in Service Sector Employment
The grant will support the investigation of strategies that workers in precarious service occupations in the hospitality and long-term care sectors develop and implement to combat the adverse outcomes of precarious employment (PE) for worker well-being and quality of life. In addition to the strategies employed by the workers themselves, alleviating the adverse effects of precarious work in these sectors requires employers to make meaningful changes to working situations and employment conditions. The study will also identify organizational strategies that can mitigate the underlying risk factors of PE and enable workers to experience a sense of wellbeing. In contrast with previous research that adopts a top-down approach to studying precarious work, the project will adopt a bottom-up approach that starts with the workers themselves, identifies well-being issues of importance to them. Funds will be used to support graduate student research assistants and field work.