After eight months of consultation with the community, as well as internal and external research partners, the 91��ɫ Senate has unanimously approved the University’s new strategic research plan, "Building on Strength".

“91��ɫ’s new strategic research plan commits to building research on our strengths and provides a strong aspirational vision for the development and recognition of 91��ɫ’s research over the next five years,” said Robert Haché, vice-president research & innovation.  “I would like to thank the entire 91��ɫ community for your positive response to the consultation process and earnest engagement that made such important contributions to the development of the plan.  We will continue to invest in the growth and development of our research as a foundational part of our efforts to grow our academic reputation as a recognized leading research-intensive university.”

Robert Haché

The plan supports the University’s research vision to better understand the human condition and the world around us and to employ the knowledge gained in the service of society as described in six intersecting themes:

• advancing fundamental discovery and critical knowledge,
• analyzing cultures and mobilizing creativity,
• building healthy lives and communities,
• exploring the frontiers of science and technology,
• forging a just and sustainable world,
• integrating entrepreneurial innovation and the public good.

The plan also articulates five areas of opportunities that complement past accomplishments, new developments, momentum and timing to provide particular opportunities for building research success.  They include:

• digital cultures,
• engineering research that matters,
• healthy individuals, healthy communities and global health,
• public engagement for a just and sustainable world, and
• scholarship of socially engaged research.

Through this plan, the University is implementing the objectives set out for research in both the University Academic Plan and the Provost’s 2010 white paper, which identify research intensification as a key University goal and recognize research as a core endeavor that broadly enriches the institution. The plan is meant to be a living document, responsive to the University's successes, as well as being sensitive to a rapidly evolving landscape.

Through a strategic combination of broadly based and focused investments over the course of the next five years, 91��ɫ will continue its impressive development as a leading Canadian research university whose scholarship enhances our culture and improves society.

To view the full plan, click .

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin to research stories on the research website.

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Claudio Colaguori, a professor in 91��ɫ’s human rights and criminology programs, explores the idea that competition is not a biological drive as evolutionary thinkers believe, but a power force that promotes interpersonal conflict, war and cyclical domination.

The launch of Agon Culture (de Sitter Publications) will take place Wednesday, Feb. 15, from 3 to 5pm, in the Senior Common Room, 305 Founders College, Keele campus. Everyone is welcome to attend and refreshments will be provided.

In Agon Culture, Colaguori outlines the problem of having competition as the organizing principle of social life. He analyzes the human condition by examining how the cultural ideology of competition operates as a mode of rationality that underpins the order of domination.

By combining insights from philosopher Theodor Adorno’s critical theory of society with a reconstruction of the philosophy of the agon (a Greek term for competition), the book formulates a novel critical theory of cultural domination. It offers insights into society’s winner-loser culture and a renewed intensity of social Darwinist tendencies.

Colaguori’s research interests include post 9/11 global human rights issues and their relation to social change. He is a two-time winner of the John O’Neill Award for Teaching Excellence and was nominated for TVOntario’s Best Lecturer Competition.

The launch is sponsored by 91��ɫ Bookstore and Founders College.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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