Research Impact Canada Engaged Scholarship Winner

Rural Resilience researcher, Brady Reid, is one of the recipients of the 2021 Research Impact Canada (RIC) Engaged Scholarship Award for Graduate Students! This award, in its inaugural year, recognizes graduate students whose research leads to increased awareness of audiences beyond academia or changes in stakeholder actions, practices, guidelines, or policies. Brady recently graduated from Memorial University with a MA in Environmental Policy in 2019 and began pursuing a Ph.D. in Rural Studies at the University of Guelph. He is also the coordinator for the PhiLab Atlantic Hub research network, a blog editor for the Regional Studies Association, and a part of the research team for several Rural Resilience projects (check out Place-Based Endowments in the Periphery and Remote Controlled)

Here is some background on Brady’s work, as provided by RIC:

Mr. Reid’s research interests intersect environmental stewardship, extractive industries, rural community development, and Indigenous self-determination.

Mr. Reid’s project – Traditional Knowledge and Land Use: Building Research Relationships with a Rural Ktaqmkuk Mi’kmaw Community – emerged from a collaborative research effort between the No’kmaq Village Mi’kmaw Band (Elder Calvin White) and Grenfell Campus, Memorial University. Researchers working with Indigenous groups or communities must undergo thorough self-reflection of their own positionality to identify assumptions and biases inherent to research relationships. This self-reflection – informed by open communication with community collaborators – can assess the appropriateness of research as a tool for development in that specific community at that specific time.

“Aside from a written master’s thesis, this project included a podcast, which described the results of our study and responsibility for researchers working with Indigenous groups,” said Mr. Reid. “This approach helped increase accessibility and mitigate the alienation of community participants from research results through conversational discourse.”

Brady, along with other winners of this award, presented their work at the 2021 Canadian Association of Research Administrators (CARA) Conference on May 13, 1:15 -2:45 p.m. EST.