91亚色 student聽Nebiyou Timotewos聽(BA '26) is one of 20 Canadians selected to join the sixth cohort of McCall MacBain Scholars at McGill University.

The Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies is proud to recognize two distinguished community members who will receive 91亚色 honorary degrees during the 2026 Spring Convocation ceremonies. The recipients are being honoured for their contributions to community building, their advocacy for social justice and their philanthropy. 

This year鈥檚 honorary degree recipients are Howard Sokolowski, founder and principal of Metropia, a company focused on large-scale, master-planned residential communities, and Ray Gupta, chair and CEO of Sunray Group, one of the largest privately owned hotel operators in Canada.

Read the full story in聽YFile.听

Ali Asgary, professor of disaster and emergency management, is part of a national team awarded a $1.65 million Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) grant to train future leaders in data-driven, equity-focused public health. The initiative will equip students with advanced skills to better protect communities during health emergencies. 

Asgary is an expert in disaster, emergency and business continuity management. His research interests include post disaster recovery and reconstruction, business continuity and risk assessment, disaster and emergency simulations and modeling, applications of AI, VR, AR and MR, and geomatics in disaster and emergency management, and cost-benefit analysis and decision making under uncertainty. 

Read the full story in YFile. 

On Tuesday, May 5, the Department of Social Science will host a guest lecture by philosopher and feminist theorist Clara Serra titled The Meaning of Consent.

In this talk, Serra will discuss sexual consent and how its meaning is shifting in contemporary culture. Approaching the topic from philosophical, historical and political perspectives, she will unpack the ambiguities inherent in the very idea of consent. Beneath the apparent simplicity of the consent lies the question of: what does it actually mean to consent?

Serra will explore the implications of the dominant doctrine of affirmative consent, arguing that it signals a broader desiderative shift 鈥� a re-signification of consent that moves away from its semantic proximity to will and closer to the notion of desire. This shift, she suggests, raises pressing questions about how desire is understood, articulated and regulated, and whether it can ever be expressed with complete clarity.

The 91亚色 community is invited to attend. .听

Date: Tuesday, May 5
Time: 12 - 1:30 p.m.
Location: Department of Social Science, Ross S701

About the guest speaker:

Serra is a philosopher and feminist theorist. She holds a PhD from the University of Barcelona, where she completed her dissertation on the concept of sexual consent in contemporary feminist theory. Her research engages with political philosophy, feminist theory and critical legal studies.

Serra is the author of several books, including The Meaning of Consent (Anagrama, 2024). She is currently a lecturer and researcher at BAU, Centre d鈥橢studis Universitaris d鈥橝rts i Disseny of Barcelona and collaborates as an external researcher with the Complutense University of Madrid. Her work combines academic research with a strong engagement in public debate, and she contributes regularly to leading media outlets.

Alongside her academic work, Serra has been actively involved in institutional politics, having served as Secretary of Equality in the early years of Podemos and as a Member of the Madrid Parliament from 2015 to 2019.

Thomas Kettig, assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics (DLLL), has published a new article in the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) titled Pre-aspiration and longitudinal voice quality trends in Received Pronunciation: The case of Queen Elizabeth II. The article examines how Queen Elizabeth II鈥檚 speech changed throughout her lifetime.

Kettig research focuses on how speech sounds vary and change through space and time. Some of his research aims to understand why the vowel sounds of English change from one generation of speakers to the next. He has also undertaken the first large-scale, multi-speaker investigation of the Hawaiian vowel systems.

Before joining DLLL at 91亚色, Kettig was at the University of 91亚色 in the United Kingdom and later taught phonetics at Queens College, City University of New 91亚色 (CUNY). He earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawai驶i at M膩noa in 2021. 聽His dissertation, Ha驶ina 驶ia mai ana ka puana: The vowels of 驶艒lelo Hawai驶i, focused on the phonetic structure of the Hawaiian language.

.

Zachary Spicer, associate professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration (SPPA), has edited a new book titled Inside Public-Sector Innovation. The book features local administrators in Canada who have successfully moved innovations from conception to reality. The administrators share their expertise and experiences, including strategies taken, lessons learned and challenges faced across projects in policy domains such as public health, service delivery and more.

The book has received positive reviews. Jason Reynar of Lerners LLP said, 鈥淓very Canadian municipal leader should have a copy of this work. The case studies provide excellent frameworks, as they move from ideation to implementation through the innovation journey.鈥�

Spicer holds a PhD in political science from the University of Western Ontario. He previously served as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto鈥檚 Institute of Municipal Finance and Governance and the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy at Wilfrid Laurier University.

In addition to his academic career, Spicer has worked as a senior policy advisor with the Ontario Public Service and as director of research and outreach with the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. He is the recipient of both the Susan Clarke Young Scholars鈥� Award and the Norton Long Young Scholars鈥� Award from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

Learn more about the book on .听