Newcomer Researchers
Research Interests: Collaborative learning; English for academic purposes; second language (L2) socialization; intercultural and cross-cultural competencies
Positioned at the intersection of Applied Linguistics, Communication, and Education, Dr. Boz’s research is centered on developing and applying novel discourse analysis techniques to better understand how students negotiate and (re)construct their interactional roles and identities in academic learning settings. His current research project explores post-secondary international and newcomer students’ L2 practices within academic and social settings (e.g., negotiating roles in group work, requesting feedback from peers and instructors, access to social capital, etc.). Additionally, Umit is currently involved in a collaborative research study investigating how students, staff, and faculty interpret, enact, and respond to cross-cultural competencies (CCC) in post-secondary contexts.
– Werklund School of Education
Research Interests: Critical/cultural psychology; Cognitive science and literary theory; Community-based advocacy research; poverty, language, immigration, and technology
James Cresswell’s research interests range from critical/cultural psychology to cognitive science and literary theory. All of it focusses on linking academic theory to community-based advocacy research. Specific content areas of research include poverty, language, immigration, and technology. He serves as a co-editor for the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and as an executive member of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology. He is the outgoing chair of the Canadian Psychological Association’s section for the History and Philosophy of Psychology and sits on the CPA’s Human Rights and Social Justice Committee. He is a research affiliate with the Canadian Poverty Institute and is a member of the Newcomer Research Network.
– Department of Psychology, Ambrose University
Research Interests: Advocating for community-led disaster research, Indigenous and immigrant health well-being, anti-racist and decolonial research, Indigenous water and energy justice, critical anti-racist climate change resilience, and environmental justice.
Ranjan Datta, PhD. Canada Research Chair II in Community Disaster Research at Indigenous Studies, Department of Humanities, Mount Royal University, Calgary. Alberta, Canada. Dr. Datta has developed a strong understanding of decolonial and relational research frameworks in his 17 years conducting research with Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Canada, USA, and South Asia. His current research program is supported by his existing network of Indigenous, visible minority immigrants and refugees, Black communities, scholars, students, practitioners, and professionals in Canada and beyond. In Datta’s community service activities, he has been involved with social well-being and justice movements. He served as a board director for several community organizations.
– Department of Humanities at Mount Royal University
Research Interests:Cross-cultural mental health, refugee mental health, reconciliatory processes, social justice and human rights.
Dr. Régine U. King is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Work and an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Manitoba. Dr. King has a Bachelor of Education (Social Sciences of Education) from the National University of Rwanda, a Master of Education (M.Ed.) in Counseling Psychology and Community Development and a Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of Toronto. She also has post-doctoral training in social aetiology of mental illness (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health), University of Toronto. Dr. King’s research interests focus on psychosocial processes involving survivors of organized and structural violence, including approaches to cross-cultural mental health, and forgiveness and reconciliation among survivors of organized violence (mainly refugees and those who resettle in post-conflict settings). Dr. King’s transnational research interests are rooted in her extensive practice experience in community-based mental health organizations in Canada and Rwanda. As a community-based researcher, Dr. King has used narrative inquiry, oral history, and interpretive research methods. She is very concerned about social inequities, social justice, human rights, and means to prevent violence.
– Faculty of Social Work
Research Interests: Immigration, Quantitative Methods, Social Inequality and Social Justice, Work and Occupations
Dr. Naomi Lightman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include migration, the sociology of work, care work, gender and research methodology.
She recently has operated an SSHRC Insight Development Grant “Sorting and Shaping: The Dynamics of Labour Market Exclusion for Female Migrant Care Workers in Canada, 1980-2014”, for which she used administrative longitudinal data from Statistics Canada to explore how institutional settings and immigration paradigms lead to outcomes of labour market exclusion for female care workers coming from poor to wealthier nations. She is interested in measuring the impact of different migrant entry categories on care work wages over time and the upward and downward employment trajectories of women working in low wage occupations in health and education. She also actively collaborates with social agencies and government bodies including Social Planning Toronto, the Wellesley Institute, and the Calgary Local Immigration Partnership.
For her postdoctoral and PhD research she was the recipient of two SSHRC fellowships and two Ontario Graduate Scholarships.
At the University of Calgary and the University of Toronto, she has been the sole course instructor for Gender and Care, Sociology of Work, Social Policy, Sociology of International Migration, and six courses on basic and advanced quantitative research methods in the Sociology Departments, as well as developing an online course entitled An Introduction to Regression.
-Department of Sociology
Research interests: Bilingual/Second Language Education, French Immersion School, Second Language Teaching and Learning, Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Qualitative Research - Ethnography
Dr. Sylvie Roy’s research focuses on discourses and practices of learning and teaching French as a second language. Related to this work is looking at macro and micro understanding of language issues, ideologies, discursive practices in francophone or French immersion contexts in Canada. She also looks at what people say about bilingualism and multilingualism from a sociolinguistic for change point of view. Sociolinguistic for change look at language practices from a critical lenses and situated in historical context, in time and space. Sociolinguistic of change allow researchers and participants to understand that they are part of constructing discourses and linguistic ideologies. Social dynamics are explicitly discussed and utilized for change in scSee full profilehools and other public institutions.
Current Projects:
Apprentissage du français en immersion au primaire : discours et pratiques (CRSH)
Learning French in immersion : discourses and practices (SSHRC)
- Worklund School of Education
Research Interests: Homelessness and elder abuse prevention among immigrant women
Dr. Christine Walsh hails from the Faculty of Social Work and her research interests involve contributing to the understanding of violence across the lifespan, and populations affected by social exclusion, poverty and homelessness. Her current research projects include:
• Telling: Examining Cross-Cultural Patterns in Adolescent Maltreatment Disclosures
• Centre Street Urban Design and Social Strategy Project
• Elder Abuse: Developing an Approach to Measure Prevalence and Determinants
• Optimal Shelter Design for Homeless Women: Site, Situation, and Service
- Faculty of Social Work
Research Interests: Medical Sociology, History of Science and Genetics, Decolonization of biomedicine, Precision Medicine, Racialized communities
Dr. Arafaat A. Valiani is a medical sociologist and an historian of science and genetics. His current intellectual interests focus on questions of decolonization regarding biomedicine, specifically genomics, difference and precision medicine, especially among South Asians and other racialized peoples. His teaching and scholarship contribute to transdisciplinary debates about difference, social justice and biomedicine; the sociology of knowledge and medicine; history of science and genetics; gender and South Asian Studies. His contribution to these forms of knowledge sharing strives to productively impact understandings of health equity for racialized communities.
- Graduate Faculty in the Department of Indigenous, Race and Ethnic Studies and Global Health
Research Interests: Mitigating barriers in access to care and unmet health needs of newcomers
His current research includes mitigation of barriers to health care faced by the immigrant community. Turin also explores using social media as a means of knowledge translation activity for promoting health. He draws upon his background as a clinician with a diverse set of research methodological experiences and has been involved in research projects which focus on dynamic changes in risk factors and long-term risk projections using administrative data sources.
– Cumming School of Medicine
Research Interests: Interdisciplinary Research Evaluation; Social Network Analysis; Gender; Demography; Social Determinants of Health; Weight-Related Health; Interprofessional Practice; Ethics of Research with Human Participants
Jenny Godley, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary. Trained as a quantitative sociologist, she uses demographic and social network analytic techniques to examine the processes which lead to and perpetuate social inequalities in health. She has experience analyzing large, population-level datasets linked to administrative health data, and collecting and analyzing both whole and egocentric social network data. She has examined the effects of immigrant status, race, and ethnicity on several health and health service utilization outcomes, including hospitalization, BMI, cancer, and cardiovascular disease, and has studied patterns of everyday discrimination in Canada. Dr. Godley also has a long-standing interest in social science research ethics; she has served as the Chair of the Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board at the University of Calgary since 2019. She is currently working with other NRN members and community-based organizations to co-develop ethical guidelines for research with newcomer communities.
– Department of Sociology
Research Interests: migration; newcomer youth; school integration; diversity counselling; cultural and social justice responsiveness
Dr. Anusha Kassan’s scholarly interests are informed by her own bi-cultural identity. As such, her program of study is informed by an overarching social justice lens. Anusha’s research presently includes two major foci. First, she is conducting research pertaining to migration experiences across different populations (i.e., newcomer youth, same-sex binational couples and LGBTQ newcomers). Second, she is carrying out research in the area of teaching and learning, investigating cultural and social justice competencies among graduate students and field supervisors. Anusha is committed to the implications of this research for counselling training and practice.
- Werklund School of Education
Research Interests: Cardiovascular complications of liver disease, cirrhotic cardiomyopathy, central neural regulation of circulation in cirrhosis (including cannibinoid receptors and portal hypertension), mesenteric venous capacitance in cirrhosis, peripheral vascular dysfunction in cirrhosis, Clinical studies in chronic viral hepatitis,
- The Gastrointestinal Research Group
Research Interests: Second language acquisition; foreign accent; speech comprehensibility
Dr. Mary Grantham O’Brien’s research centers on communication with non-native speakers. She is interested in understanding the extent to which foreign-accented speech can be understood, and she aims to uncover which experiences can affect listeners’ understanding of accented speech. Mary has performed research with second language learners of German, French and English. She is also interested in answering larger questions around second language learning and teaching and has partnered with school boards across the province to promote more effective language teaching.
- School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures
Research interests: Language proficiency testing; language instruction; English language learners
His research programs include the field of applied linguistics, the phenomena of the English language as communicative vehicle in international professional contexts, for people from differing first language (L1) backgrounds.
Current Projects:
- Accelerating Language Acquisition for ELL Jr. High Students – Alberta Education Research Partnerships Program
- EFL (mis)communication in the Nursing Simulation Lab – Research Across Borders
- When Families Reconnect – Alberta Education Research Partnerships Program
- Werklund School of Education
Research Interests: Sustainable models of language awareness; intercultural classroom competencies; second language acquisition
Dr. Rahat Zaidi (Naqvi)’s research has been involved with school boards and the pre-service teacher education program at UCalgary as well as relevant political stakeholders and policy makers in Alberta and beyond. Her research includes (a) creating a greater awareness around the benefits of bilingualism and multilingualism, (b) broadening the framework of second language pedagogy to include application for mainstream schools, and (c) creating a language awareness curriculum for schools and introducing reading intervention programs in the context of mainstream, bilingual and heritage language schools in Canada.
- Werklund School of Education
Research Interests: Developmental and Social Psychology, Cultural differences, Social integration of newcomers, Sustainable models of language awareness;
Dr. Xu Zhao is Associate Professor at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. Trained as a developmental and social psychologist, her research focuses on understanding what knowledge, skills, values, and opportunities help individuals and communities transcend cultural differences, overcome barriers and prejudices, and support the healthy and successful development of children, families, and communities in a multi-cultural society. Currently, she is studying the factors that support or hinder the social integration of young newcomers in Canadian schools and Canadian students' attitudes towards newcomers. She is the author of Competition and Compassion in Chinese Secondary Education (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). She earned her doctorate in Human Development & Psychology from Harvard University.
- Werklund School of Education