Britt Leake is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science. His research focuses on understanding the conditions under which democracy succeeds or fails in societies with extensive ethnolinguistic or religious diversity. His dissertation project uses John Rawls’s theory of public reason as a frame through which to examine historical cases from four countries (Canada, India, Lebanon, and Spain) in which different cultural groups tried to make compromises on the terms of a social contract that would be legitimate in the eyes of each group. Britt’s research on Canada will focus...
Lydia is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, public health, and immigration at the turn of the 20th century. She is particularly interested in the work of settlement houses and milk committees in urban spaces, and how immigrant women engaged with reform projects and could lay claim to social citizenship through their mothering and hygienic practices.
Lydia’s research on Canada will explore connections between clean milk initiatives and constructions of whiteness within the transnational history of the settlement movement...
Andrew is a PhD student in the Travers Department of Political Science studying identity politics and immigration. Andrew's Hildebrand Fellowship will support a project exploring immigrant integration. Specifically, it will explore the role of Chinatown family associations in helping or hindering integration in early Canadian Chinatowns. These organizations aided Chinese immigrants in the face of exclusion and violence, with idiosyncratic membership criteria based on surname. Through conducting interviews and visiting field sites, Andrew hopes to learn more about the role of these...
