The list of SASI students below have either been awarded the Undergraduate Research Excellence Award by the Office of Research, Engagement and Graduate Studies at UFV, or have been involved in the annual Student Research Day and Poster Presentations. Each year, the Research, Engagement, and Graduate Studies office hosts a celebration dinner to honour excellence in research done by undergraduate students at UFV and to acknowledge faculty research supervisors. Faculty from each discipline are asked to nominate one student to receive the $1,000 award for outstanding research done as a research assistant or as part of a course or work study program.
2019
Shan Dhaliwal: Shan's research reflected on some of the work of the South Asian Studies Department (SASI) at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in Abbotsford, using as a foundation Dr. Courtney Szto’s dissertation (2018) on racism in Canadian Ice Hockey. His critical race theory centred analysis investigated social media responses to the “We Are Hockey” exhibit curated by the SASI (2019). Shan's work at the SASI as a Social Media Strategist helped uncover the responses made over the various social media platforms. He used critical race theory to address whether those responses corresponded with white fragility and white privilege in response to the exhibit’s work about racism faced by peoples of colour in the game of ice hockey. The research unpacked and analysed the overt and covert connotations in public responses over social media.
2017
Yuvraj Singh: Yuvraj worked as a research assistant during the fall and winter semester, 2016/17 on a number of data collation projects for the CICS. The awarded project he worked on in the fall semester of 2016 was the RBCM Provincial Consultations on Punjabi intercultural history. He attended and observed three of the seven consultations across the Province. For more details, visit the SASI newsletter page.
2016
Zaki-Al Dhamari: Zaki worked on two major data collation projects for the CICS. He first collected, thematized and graphed the data results of the CICS ‘Post Cards from the Margin’ research project. These were collected anecdotes from across all UFV campuses that reflected on issues of race amongst students, staff, faculty and admin. Zaki worked from the postcards and online responses that had been thematized already from a previous CICS Research Assistant. He looked at the range of response and themes, and then created them in visual form via bar graphs. For more details, visit the SASI newsletter page.
2015
Anecia Gill: was awarded the URE for her research excellence in creating a Social Studies 10 Lesson Plan in conjunction with the 2014 play on the Komagata Maru story that the CICS commissioned. For more details read our blog.
April 2014
CICS Student Researcher Donna Gomes Presents at Poster Day and is awarded the Undergraduate Reasearch Excellence Award
Donna researched primary source documents, the historical context of those documents, and created digital access to them. In the summer of 2013 I worked with a collection of 250 newspaper articles from the Vancouver Province published from 1907-1914. In the fall of 2013 Donna worked with a collection of over 350 documents belonging to Dr. D.P. Pandia, an Indian lawyer who travelled to Canada in 1939 and advocated on behalf of the South Asian community in B.C. He successfully fought against threatened mass deportations 1939 and worked to secure the federal, provincial, and municipal vote for South Asian immigrants in 1945-1947. Donna arranged the physical collection, digitized the documents, and created archival descriptions for each item. In the winter of 2014 Donna's final project has been to create a website showcasing the research done by the CICS, including a site devoted to research on the franchise, from 1907-1947, based on the primary source documents she worked with over the previous semesters.
March 2013
UFV Press Release on Research Day 2013
March 25, 2013
UFV celebrates student research with poster day and awards
A SAMPLER OF PROJECTS:
Shea Wind — Indo-Canadian Studies
White-Canada Forever: A Look Through The Eyes of the Vancouver Daily Province Newspaper 1906–1915
Where some posters were filled with graphs and lengthy text explanations, Shea Wind’s posterboard was instead filled with photocopies of newspaper headlines.
“This is pretty much a representation of what I did for the Centre for Indo-Canadian Studies in the fall semester,” Wind said. “I transcribed articles from the Vancouver Daily Province newspaper, focusing on Indo-Canadian immigration to British Columbia and the racism that arose from that.”
These racist undertones are easy to see in the headlines he’s picked out to include as part of the presentation: The headline “Will Arrest Hindu Who Is Alleged To Have Voted” stares at the viewer in all caps, and suspicion seems to be a prevalent theme.
“There are definitely some stories that shock you, that this could happen in the last 100 years. It shows just how brutal British Columbians could be to outsiders during this time period,” Wind noted.
This project was one he undertook while working for the Centre for Indo-Canadian Studies last fall.
“I loved the whole project,” Wind said.
2012
CICS student researchers Ms.Saman Brar and Ms. Alvina Kumar also presented a micro lecture highlighting their research work on the 100 year Indo-Canadian History Research project and The Fiji Project: Questions of home, belonging and return respectively.
2011
Amanpreeet Kaur Dhami created an extensive timeline looking at the history of South Asian migration to Canada from 1904 to the 1950's.
