Frank Deer.
One new RSC Fellow, one new RSC College member
Professor Dawne McCance has been named a new Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and professor Frank Deer has been elected a member of the RSC’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
New Fellows, such as McCance, are elected by their peers for their outstanding scholarly, scientific and artistic achievement. Recognition by the RSC is the highest honour an individual can achieve in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences. Members of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, such as Deer, includes top mid-career leaders in Canada, who, upon being named to the College, gain a multigenerational capacity to help Canada and the world address major challenges and seize new opportunities including those identified in emerging fields.
“We are proud of the impact Drs. McCance and Deer have had on our society and congratulate them on their worthy recognitions,” says Digvir Jayas, vice-president (research and international) and Distinguished Professor at the U of M.
The researchers will be inducted at the RSC Celebration of Excellence in Ottawa, Nov. 20-24.
About the researchers
Frank Deer is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education who grew up in the community of Kahnawake – a First Nation just south of Montreal. He holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Education and his principal areas of research are Indigenous language education, and Indigenous religion, spirituality and philosophy.
His work aims to understand the ways in which Indigenous languages are important to the social development and cultural identities of Indigenous peoples, and to understand how Canadian Indigenous language revitalization and its sustainability can be appropriately incorporated into primary and secondary school programming.
Dawne McCance is a Distinguished Professor in the department of religion in the Faculty of Arts. She is an internationally recognized scholar who, through publications and lectures, has opened and enabled new research methodologies in genetics and animal ethics, disability studies, and institutional formations. She has set herself apart by the consistent interdisciplinarity of both her historical and philosophical research, and her work in theoretical and applied ethics. For example, her book Posts: Re Addressing the Ethical was one of the first sustained studies to draw vital resources for rethinking Western individualist ethics from the work of five twentieth century French philosophers, psychoanalysts, and linguistic theorists.
Her crossdisciplinary research effectively engages today’s most pressing social and ethical concerns. Preeminent among these concerns for her are those associated with conceptual and technological developments that have taken place in biology and genetics since the 1950s. In her book, Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction, she argues that current multinational industrialized farming operations which involve the editing and global marketing of highly profitable animal genomes and/or gene segments raise a conundrum of philosophical-ethical issues pertaining to the definition, and treatment, of animal life, as well as to human health. Over the last decade, Dr. McCance has focused her teaching and research increasingly on climate change issues, particularly those pertaining to water pollution and scarcity, and related to this, global climate refugees.
Research at the University of Manitoba is partially supported by funding from the Government of Canada Research Support Fund.
I am alumni of the University of Manitoba and have received the high distinction as Doctor Honoris Causa.