Dr. Mohammad Ferdosi awarded SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant
Dr. Mohammad Ferdosi, Ritsuko Sugiman Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Policy Studies, has been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Engage Grant (PEG) (external link) . This achievement underscores Dr. Ferdosi's commitment to advancing knowledge through research that directly impacts the community and informs decision-making processes within the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors.
The SSHRC PEG is designed to provide short-term and timely support for partnered research activities that address the immediate needs and time constraints faced by organizations outside the academic realm. These grants foster small-scale, stakeholder-driven partnerships, enabling non-academic organizations and postsecondary researchers to leverage each other’s unique knowledge, expertise, and capabilities on topics of mutual interest.
Dr. Ferdosi's project will delve into the first-hand experiences of low-income job seekers navigating Ontario's evolving social assistance landscape in order to understand recipients' service access, employment prospects and quality of life. As the lead applicant and principal investigator, Dr. Ferdosi is collaborating with co-applicants Dr. Bryan Evans from TMU's Department of Politics and Public Administration and Dr. Peter Graefe from McMaster University's Department of Political Science. Together, they are collaborating with the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction (external link) , the community partner for this research.
Their goal is to advance the Roundtable's commitment to evidence-based advocacy and policy development, emphasizing lived experiences in understanding how changes to social assistance and labour markets affect marginalized groups in order to generate informed policy recommendations. The project will also include a comparative analysis between the experiences of social assistance recipients and those who participated in Ontario's basic income pilot, using previously collected data. This approach will illuminate the differential impacts policy environments have on the autonomy, decision-making, and outcomes of low-income job seekers, enriching the Roundtable's advocacy work with insights into the varying effectiveness of social support structures. Dr. Ferdosi's (PDF file) recent publication (external link) in collaboration with the Roundtable, which includes a foreword by former Premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne—who launched the basic income pilot in 2017—advances this research with a qualitative exploration of the pilot, capturing the intricate effects of the policy on participants' well-being through their personal stories and experiences.
Dr. Ferdosi's project stands as an example of academic engagement with real-world challenges and our collective pursuit of impactful scholarship.