YCAR Graduate Associates Noa Nahmias (History) and Jolin Joseph (Gender, Feminist & Women’s Studies) are two of six York students to receive a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for exceptional PhD students. The award is a signature achievement in part due to its immense research support — providing doctoral students $50,000 annually for up to three years to support their work – but also in that it signifies recipients as emerging leaders in their respective fields.
“This is an outstanding result for our graduate students,” said York’s President and Vice-Chancellor Mamdouh Shoukri. “These Vanier scholars exemplify the world-class scholarship that is underway at the University, and their achievement is a wonderful testament to the groundbreaking research and innovative approaches to teaching for which York is known.”
The recipients are: Samantha Fashler (Clinical Psychology), Jolin Joseph (Gender, Feminist & Women’s Studies), Kyo Maclear (Education), Noa Nohmias (History), Christopher Vanden Berg (Political Science) and Dessi Zaharieva (Kinesiology & Health Science).
Noa Nahmias’ research examines the relationship between knowledge production, science and nation building through the lens of material culture. Her research asks how notions of science and knowledge were negotiated and portrayed to the public in 19th- and 20th-century China. She focuses on museums, since these sites can provide answers to these questions through material objects and display techniques. Studying the objects selected for the display, as well as the display techniques from the language used to the arrangement and order, reveals much about processes of knowledge production in general, and how these were carried out in China in particular.
Nahmias’ research contributes and complicates our understanding of what knowledge production is and how it relates to national and transnational currents. French Jesuits, British naturalists and Chinese entrepreneurs participated in museum building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This period also saw intense transnational encounters, which changed how Chinese elites viewed knowledge. Her research uses this historical backdrop to explore the concept of knowledge migration and knowledge production.
The migration of domestic workers has become big business, involving millions of women, billions of dollars and a multiplicity of agencies and intermediaries. Although an increasingly important avenue towards employment for women, state policy, (im)migration regulations, and media discourses combine to situate migrant domestic workers in a gendered and racially segregated labour market. Jolin Joseph’s doctoral research will render visible this undocumented, precarious and invisible form of waged work and the implications of current policies related to mobility and labour that do not adequately take gender into account.
The situation of migrant domestic workers is a particularly compelling illustration of the need for transnational governance in an era of globalization. Joseph’s research aims to fill knowledge gaps regarding domestic work in Saudi Arabia, and provide the information necessary for stakeholders to develop interventions that promote and protect of migrant rights and mobility. Joseph anticipates that this study will contribute to critical understandings of migrant lives and institutional processes as embodied and embedded in global-local settings.
The full YFile story is available at: http://yfile.news.yorku.ca/2015/11/03/six-york-graduate-students-awarded-vanier-scholarships