Bouchard wins national book prize

Two faculty members receive recognition for professional excellence 

Recreation access boosted through community collaboration

NMP faculty member honoured with two teaching awards

UNBC Board elects new Chair

Vanier scholar examines UN goals

Bouchard wins national book prize

Anthropology Professor Dr. Michel Bouchard is the first UNBC researcher to win one of Canada’s most prestigious national academic book prizes.  

Bouchard won the Prix du Canada en sciences humaines et sociales, for his book Les Bois-Brûlés de l’Outaouais. The Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences  awards the prize to the best French-language book in the humanities and social sciences published in Canada each year. 

Bouchard shares the award with his co-authors Dr. Sébastien Malette, an Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, and independent researcher Guillaume Marcotte. 
“It was quite a shock when I first received the letter notifying us that we had won the award,” Bouchard says. “It’s an incredible honour, given the distinguished academics who have received this prize in the past.” 

According to Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the winning book makes an exceptional contribution to scholarship, is engagingly written, and enriches the social, cultural and intellectual life of Canada. The award comes with a $10,000 prize. 

The book makes the argument that a historical Métis community exists in the Outaouais region of western Québec and points to cultural similitudes and ancestral linkages to established Métis communities in western Canada. 

An English language version of the book, Bois-Brûlés: The Untold Story of the Métis of Western Québec, is available from UBC Press.  

Two faculty members receive recognition for professional excellence 

The Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) bestowed Environmental Science Professor Dr. Peter Jackson with the title Fellow of the Society. CMOS awards the honour to members who have provided exceptional long-term service and support to the Society, and/or who have made outstanding contributions to the scientific, professional, educational, forecasting or broadcasting fields in atmospheric or ocean sciences in Canada. 

School of Education Lecturer Deborah Koehn received the Association of BC Deans of Education 2020 Teacher Educator award. It is presented annually to a teacher educator who has distinguished themselves in partnering with a teacher education program in British Columbia.  

Recreation access boosted through community collaboration

Working together with Spinal Cord Injury BC’s Access BC team, Drs. Mark Groulx, Shannon Freeman and Pamela Wright are supporting work to create more barrier-free outdoor destinations.  

With support from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Engage grant, audits were completed at outdoor tourism and recreation sites around B.C. in conjunction with ongoing work Access BC undertakes to collect data on accessibility needs. Audits consider various potential barriers that may exist at sites, such as path widths, trail slopes, and washroom sink/toilet heights.  

Their research has led to the development of a new digital tool that will help Access BC in further streamlining of processes and collation of data for reports that can be shared with recreational, municipal and tourism stakeholders. 

NMP faculty member honoured with two teaching awards

Dr. Sean Maurice, a senior lab instructor with the Northern Medical Program (NMP), has been recognized with two prestigious teaching awards. He was honoured for his dedication to teaching with the 2019-20 Robert W. Tait Annual Lecture on Implementing Teaching Excellence Award at UNBC, and a 2019-20 Killam Teaching Prize from the University of British Columbia (UBC). 

“It’s humbling to have received these awards from UNBC and UBC,” said Maurice. “It means that both institutions value teaching as well educational leadership, and  that teaching is not something static, but something that requires effort, sincerity, and ongoing attention. Teaching at many levels and in many venues is important to ensure the institutions meet the needs of their various stakeholders, and their social accountability mandates to the community. 

The NMP is a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine MD Undergraduate Program, delivered in partnership with UNBC. 

UNBC Board elects new Chair

 Aaron Ekman, a well-known figure in B.C.’s labour relations sphere, is the new Chair of UNBC’s Board of Governors.  

Ekman began his service on the board in May 2018 as a provincially appointed representative and was reappointed in July 2019 for an additional two-year term.  

Ekman hails from Terrace and moved to Prince George in 2009, the same year he was elected president of the Prince George & District Labour Council. In 2011, while representing and negotiating on behalf of provincial public servants and health-care workers across northern B.C., became the founding president of the North Central Labour Council. In 2014, Ekman was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, and served two terms. 

The 15-member UNBC Board of Governors has oversight and responsibility for the management, administration and finances of the University.  

Vanier scholar examines UN goals

Christiana Onabola, a Health Sciences PhD student, has earned a federally-funded Vanier Scholarship. The award is for her research that focuses on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how they are relevant to local populations and communities along the Nechako Watershed and Niger Delta in Nigeria in order to strengthen the goals’ tenet of leaving no one behind. 

In 2015, world leaders at the United Nations put together the 17 SDGs, a set of global goals to tackle economic, social and environmental challenges that are local and global in nature. 

“There are, however, concerns about how these goals interact and what happens when, for instance, a goal related to health and the environment is traded off in order to meet another tailored towards economic development,” explains Onabola. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Nadezhda (Nadia) Mamontova joined UNBC this fall as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow as she explores the legacy of ethnographer and linguist Glafira Vasilevich and what her 20th-century cartography project means for the Evenki people in Siberia.  

The project, titled Vernacular Geography and Indigenous Participatory Mapping in Soviet Russia: Examining the Legacy of Glafira Vasilevich’s Cartographic Project, will explore the methods Vasilevich used to collect the maps, examine her motivations and trace the legacy of the place names she used.