My health and age have severely restricted the time available to explore and advance my research activities. They don’t stop me dreaming, however.
Here are a few of them—along with details and materials that can provide a basis for anyone interested in exploring, revising, or advancing them. I will be happy to help—within the limits of my diminished capacity. This means I am unable to lead a search for funding or formal advising, but remain available for comments and encouragement.
- Explorations of social capital, social cohesion, and community capacity. This project(s) involves the conceptualization, measurement, and analysis of these concepts using experience and data from several regional, national, and community sources. Potential research questions may include the following.
- What are the definitions and indicators for social capital, social cohesion, and community capacity?
- What are the relationships among them?
- How have they changed over the years: among the NRE field sites, within other communities?
- To what other community characteristics are they related?
- In what ways have NRE initiatives affected them?
- The Trajectories of Communities. This project explores the characteristics and changes in communities over time. It primarily relies on Canadian census data between 1986 and 2016 with additions from special surveys such as community finances and businesses (https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/sociology-anthropology/research/nre/resources/NREData.html). Potential research questions may include the following.
- What are some of the most important changes in rural and remote communities over the last three decades?
- What are the paths of change among rural and remote communities over that time?
- How can these trajectories of change be best represented for descriptive and analytical purposes?
- What are the external and local conditions related to the trajectories?
- What strategies and policies are suggested by these results, for local communities, regional governance, provincial governments, and federal government organizations?
- Do new AI techniques provide useful approaches to the analysis of trajectories? If so, in what ways?
- Update to the NRE Rural Observatory. This project extends the information and analysis gathered during the 11-year NRE Rural Economy project. It uses the historical, survey, profile, and other data from the project, replicates and/or expands some of the information to the current period, and analyzes the changes and processes taking place over the years since the project. Potential research questions may include the following.
- How have the field sites changed over the decade from the NRE—with respect to the key factors examined in the project (including the Rural Observatory grid)?
- What are the most important local and regional events and initiatives that have occurred over that period of time (update the NRE Profile series)? (https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/sociology-anthropology/research/nre/resources/Instruments.html)
- What other case studies have been conducted in Canada, where are they located with respect to the Rural Observatory grid, and in what ways do they inform us regarding community processes?
- Archives from the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation (CRRF) and its related projects (e.g. The New Rural Economy Project and the Rural Policy Learning Commons). This project includes the organization of materials from these archives for inclusion within the University of Guelph Archives. Most of the materials have been documented and digitized but considerable work is required to make them easy to locate and retrieve (https://crrf.ca/crrf-archives/). Key questions to address are the following.
- What are the essential files to retain for the archives?
- How should the items be organized to provide the most useful means of retrieval?
- In what ways should the archive materials be stored to maximize longevity and ease of access?
- How do contemporary AI approaches improve the storage and retrieval of archived materials? What do they require with respect to the format and coding of archive materials?