By Ellen Tsaprailis
Carleton’s Carole Therrien has been awarded the 2024 Richard F. Salisbury Award.
The fourth year PhD student in Anthropology—with a Specialization in Political Economy—was pleasantly surprised to have won this award.
“I’m quite lucky and honoured that my research that focuses on how women thrive and dedicate themselves to others was selected,” says Therrien. “I felt that it was a great reflection on the calibre of research that comes out of Carleton University and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
“There is some very exciting work being done here in the humanities.”
Carole Therrien, a PhD Anthropology student at Carleton University, has won the 2024 Richard F. Salisbury Award
The Salisbury Award is given to an outstanding PhD candidate, enrolled at a Canadian university, for the purposes of defraying expenses incurred while carrying out dissertation fieldwork.
Therrien’s research focuses on change management at times of crisis.
“In particular, I am looking at the role that women who work both within and outside the home play in building social resilience in communities in multi-disaster recovery settings. My field site is St. Maarten/Saint Martin, a Caribbean Island under two overseas jurisdictions: France and The Netherlands,” explains Therrien.
“Over the last decade or so, they’ve had multiple, devastating hurricanes that had huge economic and cultural impacts; add the ravages of COVID-19 on their primary tourism industry, and it’s a community facing huge recovery challenges at the human level. Women in Sint Maarten/St. Martin have had to play “recovery” roles by maintaining primary employment, providing family care and re-weaving those ties that existed within the community prior to the disasters. With a precarious economy dependent on so many external factors, looking at how the women help re-build and maintain the “soft infrastructure” of communities—through the axis of their values and actions—may provide us with an idea of how islands can adjust and thrive in worsening climate conditions.”
As Therrien gears up to write her dissertation, she will continue the fieldwork she has been conducting; and some of the award money will go toward projecting the voices of the women she has researched through a series of public speaking events she has committed to.
The Richard F. Salisbury student award is given in memory of Dr. Richard Frank Salisbury, a founding member of the McGill University Department of Anthropology as well as the McGill Centre for Developing Areas Studies. Salisbury was the author of From Stone to Steel (1962) and A Homeland for the Cree (1986). His leadership on the James Bay Project helped the James Bay Cree and the Government of Quebec to work out the historic treaty that has become a model for reconciling Indigenous autonomy with economic development.
Thursday, May 2, 2024 in 360, Awards, Grad Student Research, News
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