University researchers in Mississauga earn more than $2 million in grants

A University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) sociology professor has received $270,000 in federal government funding to continue her research in areas of justice and racial hierarchies in the Americas. 

Prof. Luisa Farah Schwartzman is one of 18 UTM researchers in 10 departments who received a total of more than $2 million in funding via the latest round of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). 

The SSHRC collaborates with organizations from across the not-for-profit, private and public sectors to support and promote training, research and connection activities in the social sciences and humanities 

UTM sociology Prof. Luisa Farah Schwartzman earned $270,000 in grants to continue her research.

Schwartzman actually received two grants, an Insight Grant and an Insight Development Grant, in the competition for research funding.  

She’s working on two projects: “Bringing democracy into the law: Urban inequalities and struggles over rights and fairness in the Brazilian Justice System” and “Centering Indigenous, African and Afro-American and South Atlantic political institutions: Toward a new historical sociology of the emergence of racial hierarchies in the Americas.”  

“The Insight Development Grant will allow me to build on my previous work in understanding the origins of racial hierarchies and social relationships, but from a more historical sociology perspective,” said Schwartzman, an associate professor of sociology.  

With the Insight Grant, she’ll continue to study the power structures, workings of the law and the struggles over justice in São Paula, Brazil with a focus on particular cases that includes teenage girls and their families, legal professionals and public defence lawyers, and feminist social movements. 

Other UTM researchers to receive Insight Grants are working on a wide variety of projects, including issues of intimate partner violence, young children’s ability to ask informative questions and other subjects.