Principal Investigator

Dr. Dianne Looker

Dianne.Looker@msvu.ca – Mount Saint Vincent University , Department of Sociology

Looker was recently named a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Equity and Technology, Mount Saint Vincent University .

Looker is the principal investigator of the Equity and Technology Project. This research coalition will be drawing upon their unique experiences and skills to investigate teaching technology and equity in an interdisciplinary alliance with four other esteemed investigators, eighteen collaborators and over twenty partners spanning across the globe.

Looker has a strong record of working with and sharing research results with research participants, participating schools and school boards, provincial and federal policy making bodies, and practitioners dealing with youth in transition to adulthood.

Co-investigator

Cynthia Alexander

Cynthia.Alexander@acadiu.ca – Acadia University , Department of Political Science

Alexander lends the project her expertise in issues related to ICT and her extensive contacts and experiences with Aboriginal groups and, more recently, the African Nova Scotian community. She has also researched the ways in which gender and aboriginal status intersect in the use of digital technology. Her work with this project involves the connection between our research findings and potential issues of public policy formulation.

Alexander has also extensively involved her students in this project through a number of community involvement programs and assignments, while forging new networks of partners and relationships based on mutual respect and benefit.

Co-investigator

Jeffrey Karabanow

Jeff.Karabanow@dal.ca – Dalhousie University , Department of Social Work, International Development Studies and Health and Human Performance

Karabanow is a widely published scholar and is involved in numerous research projects. His main areas of interests are community development, social justice, and organizational theory and research methods.

His experience working with marginalized and homeless youth brings to the research an awareness of the potential for ICT to draw youth in from the perimeters of society, and the implications of such potential for social work practitioners who work with youth at risk.

Co-investigator

Victor Thiessen

Victor.thiessen@dal.ca – Dalhousie University , Department of Sociology

Working with Dr. Looker for over a decade, Thiessen is a highly regarded sociologist who has expertise in school-to-work transitions, family dynamics, rural communities and complex, multi-variant analysis. He has served on the HRDC Panel of Experts and is familiar with many of the Statistics Canada data sets to be used in the current project.

Project Management:

Ted Naylor

Ted.naylor@msvu.ca – Project Manager

Ted was hired in July 2005 as the Communications Officer. In October of 2005 he was then hired as project manager. Aside from his duties with the Equity and Technology project, he is also a provisional PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. He is currently preparing his candidacy proposal, and will draw on different components of the Equity and Technology project in a critical exploration of the crisis in higher education and corporatization of university research and practice.

Research Assistants:

Charlene Croft - Research Assistant - to Dianne Looker, PI

Charlene is a currently completing her Honour'.s degree in Sociology at Mount Saint Vincent University. Charlene is widely read, and has great skills and interest with technology, including technology related research tools. She is primarily interested in the networking capacities of ICTs, as an emerging form of capital, and their ability to bridge difference among and within groups and communities.