SSAF Information Session
2026-03-06 13:00 - 14:00 (America/Toronto)
An SSAF information session will be offered to provide an overview of the funding program, eligibility criteria, application components, followed by QAs.
Faculty and staff who plan to apply for this call are required to attend this session.
If you cannot attend, please request the recording from Dr. Thu Le at tle@yorkvilleu.ca

Date: Friday, March 06, 2026
Time: 1:00-2:00 p.m. (EST) | 10:00-11:00 a.m. (PST) | 2-3:00 p.m. (AST)
Venue: Online via Teams
Registration here

Workshop: A Grant Proposal Writing
2026-03-12 13:00 - 14:00
More information will be provided early 2026.

Let's Talk Research Cafe: Collaboration in Research
2026-04-16 13:00 - 14:00
Join our next Research Café for a relaxed, conversation‑driven session focused on collaboration in research. Connect with colleagues across disciplines, share experiences, and explore strategies for building meaningful research partnerships in a supportive and collegial space. Open to all faculty and staff.
Research Café is more than just a meeting. It’s a friendly space for conversation, reflection, and support around research practices at Yorkville University. Each session features a focused 1-hour discussion on a specific theme and offers valuable opportunity for everybody to ask questions, share ideas, and learn from your peers across disciplines.
Date: Thursday, April 16, 2026
Time: 1:00-2:00 p.m. (EST) | 10:00-11:00 a.m. (PST) | 2-3:00 p.m. (AST)
Venue: Online via Teams
🔗 Registration here.

Research in Action: Framing Autoethnography through the Arts
2026-05-20 13:00 - 14:00
Framing Autoethnography through the Arts
Date: Wednesday, May 20th, 2026
Time: 1 – 2 p.m. (EDT) | 10 – 11 a.m. (PDT) | 2 – 3 p.m. (ADT)
Mode: Online via Microsoft Teams
Register here
In this hourlong session entitled Framing Autoethnography through the Arts, special guest speaker Dr. Fiona Blaikie will examine the emergence of autoethnography framed by multimodality, situated feminist ontology, the post qualitative, immanence, and worlding.
Professor, former Dean, Chair of AERI, Associate Director, Posthumanism Research Institute, and Chief Examiner of IBO Visual Arts, Fiona’s scholarship investigates aesthetic and pedagogical values inherent in criteria for high-school studio art assessment, alongside epistemological gaps between high-school and tertiary studio art. In a shift to examine social theory on the body and clothing, her 2021 edited collection Visual and cultural identity constructs of youth and young adults: Being, becoming and belonging was published by Routledge. Recent work draws on post-qualitative methods, new materialities, worlding, posthumanism, transhumanism, popular culture and science fiction as themes for art pedagogies. Awards for scholarship include CSEA, the USSEA/InSEA International Ziegfeld Award. In November 2025 Professor Blaikie was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Arts and Humanities division.

Research Talk: Episode 2 Indigenous Framework Plans in Ontario Postsecondary Institutions with Emma Posca
2026-06-18 10:00 - 17:00
Emma Posca is a PhD candidate at York University and a settler educator specializing in Indigenization and decolonization. Her dissertation examines Indigenous Framework Plans across Ontario postsecondary institutions to analyze how colonial legacies are addressed within the academy. She has an extensive teaching dossier spanning Indigenous Studies, Sociology, Engineering, Human Geography, and Equity Studies at York University and Yorkville University. As a Course Director, she designs and delivers decolonial curricula for non-Indigenous learners, including institutionally adopted courses and faculty-focused seminars. Her teaching emphasizes reconciliation, critical self-reflection, and institutional accountability through experiential and inclusive pedagogical practices.
In this episode, Emma discusses the research behind her dissertation examining Indigenous Framework Plans across Ontario postsecondary institutions. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, her work analyzes how universities publicly frame commitments to Indigenization and reconciliation, and what these policy documents reveal about institutional priorities, accountability, and colonial legacies within higher education.
Listen to the podcast here: Episode 2: Indigenous Framework Plans in Ontario Postsecondary Institutions with Emma Posca 20260501 | Office of Academic Research | Yorkville University

Research in Action: Action Research in Higher Education
2026-07-22 13:00 - 14:00
Action research is a research methodology that examines a problem of practice. Through iterative cycles of “looking, thinking, acting” (Stringer, 2014), researchers can determine what actions might provide solutions. For this introduction to action research, Dr. Dressler will present two action research projects she has conducted as a means to demonstrate how the methodology is conducted. The first example was an examination of her own practice as an instructor of a graduate course in which students learned about and conducted action research (Brown et al., 2015). The second example was a five-year project with a team of teachers (Mueller et al., 2023). Both examples are intended to inspire others to also undertake action research.
Roswita Dressler, PhD, Professor,
University of Calgary
Dr. Dressler holds a PhD in Education and an MA in German. Her research focuses on pre-service and in-service teacher understandings of second language teaching and learning, which involve discipline-specific pedagogy, intercultural competencies, and innovation in curriculum and design. Pre-service and in-service teachers also bring to their practice their own identity as first language, heritage or second language speakers, which they often explore through study abroad and professional learning. As an educational linguist, she draws from research methodologies that integrate contextual factors: action research, nexus analysis (a discourse analytic methodology), and linguistic landscape analysis, in particularly of schoolscapes.
Register here

Let’s Talk Research Café: AI as a Research Partner: Enhancing Scholarship While Preserving Academic Judgment
2026-08-05 13:00 - 14:00
For the first time, Research Café will be hosted by a faculty member, and we are pleased to feature Dr. Amir Teymourian from the BBA program at the New Westminster campus. This session will invite faculty and staff to explore the evolving role of artificial intelligence in academic research, including how AI can support idea development, literature reviews, research design, data analysis, writing, and collaboration. The discussion will also emphasize the importance of preserving scholarly judgment, methodological rigor, ethical awareness, transparency, and academic integrity when using AI-supported tools.
Date: Wednesday, August 5th, 2026
Time: 1 – 2 p.m. (EDT) | 10 – 11 a.m. (PDT) | 2 – 3 p.m. (ADT)
Mode: Online via Microsoft Teams
🔗 Register here.
