As part of its ongoing strategy to strengthen research excellence, OCAD University’s Office of Research and Innovation has awarded seed funding to nine faculty members whose projects will explore pressing social, cultural, environmental and technological issues.
Each recipient has received $5,000, drawn from funding that the University receives through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Institutional Grant program. Seed funding is awarded by the Office of Research and Innovation following an open call for applications and an internal review of proposed research projects.
The projects, being undertaken in 2025-26, reflect OCAD U’s growing leadership in sustainability, Indigenous and community-engaged research, critical design and creative scholarship.
RECIPIENTS AND THEIR PROJECTS
Parantap Bhatt, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Design
"PRIVA: Embodied Design Rituals for Perceptual Space and Civic Awareness"
This project will develop an interdisciplinary design research method known as PRIVA, which will weave embodied practice, perceptual awareness and civic engagement. PRIVA reimagines design as a humanities method: a perceptual, civic and reflective practice, and will propose new ways of engaging communities through spatial awareness, embodied rituals, and micro-installations that inspire reflection.
Drawing on philosophical and embodied traditions, spatial storytelling and civic design systems, the project will explore how breath, presence and interaction can be ritualized into design actions that reveal new civic insight. The objective is to explore how movement, breath and sensory rituals can generate new methods for understanding, designing and sharing space, particularly civic and learning environments.
Amanda Boulos, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Art
"Translating Gaza's Digital Archive Through Contemporary Art Practice"
This research-creation project will visually analyze Instagram documentation of the war against Palestinians in Gaza to help understand how Palestinian artists and journalists in Gaza tell their stories. In addition to published writing, Boulos will produce a series of paintings and drawings that incorporate the visual tools, such as images, text collage or symbols and emojis, Gazans have used to communicate complex and urgent geopolitical concerns.
This research-creation project will bridge fast-paced social media platforms with slower art making processes to explore fundamental questions about visual representation and meaning-making. Central to the project is an age-old question: What can a painting or drawing offer that a photograph or video can’t?
This visual analysis and artmaking project will act as an alternative archive for Gazans’ social media accounts and the visual and narrative structures they have developed.
Dr. Ian Clarke, Associate Professor
Faculty of Arts and Science
"Pilot Study for Novel Bio-Materials based Process for Photographic Printing"
Many of the actual materials used in art, design and architecture are energy intensive, highly polluting, toxic to use, and contribute to global climate change by producing vast amounts of emitted carbon dioxide. This research project focuses on answering the question, “What will art and design materials look like in a more sustainable world?”
The project builds on preliminary research undertaken by Dr. Clarke that has resulted in the invention of a new biomaterial-based photographic printing chemistry that is non-toxic, stable and archival. Biomaterials such as hydrogels are widely used in the medical science as a way of producing non-toxic 3D structures to encapsulate particles, drugs and cells.
The project will further develop these preliminary results to a pilot study to investigate the utility of this chemistry to produce photographic images. This new chemistry, to generate photographic images, eliminates environmental, health or ethical impacts of prior methodologies.
Dr. Julian Haladyn, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Arts and Science
"Misregistered Histories"
“Misregistered Histories”will consider the changes that have taken place from the developments of modern history in the late 18th and early 19th century, both in philosophy and art, into the contemporary day.
Modern conceptions of history have perpetually struggled with the relationship between past and present, as seen in the major shift in history painting towards documenting more current events, such as Théodore Géricault’s 1819 The Raft of the Medusaπ.
This project will build upon and extend existing research on contemporary understandings of history and historiography, proposing a new theory of history that will be relevant for numerous fields of inquiry, including art history and criticism, philosophy, critical theory and visual studies.
SJ Okemow, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Art
"Extraction, Health, Land: A practice-based interactive documentary highlighting the history of extraction in Treaty 8, the importance of land-based practice, and mino-pimatsiwin."
The project begins from a critical engagement with the complex treaty histories of Calgary and Alberta within the context of various threats to treaty and Indigenous sovereignty amid the growing Alberta separatist movement and proposal of Bill 54 by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Treaty 8, which covers all Northern Alberta, extends up into the Northwest Territories, and includes parts of Northern Saskatchewan and BC, contains the fourth-largest oil reserve in the world, also known as the Athabasca tar sands. The petrochemical economy dictates much of the political climate within Alberta.
Okemow intends to show the deeper connections between global petrochemical systems and the direct local health implications of extraction economies. This research will advance the use of Indigenous methodologies within an institutional context and expand Indigenous epistemologies in the academy.
The project bridges personal stories of health with 3D interactive visuals of the Land. This practice-based research project will look at how layering interactive visual media, documentary film and data visualization can help communicate ongoing environmental impacts of petrochemical extraction in Northern Alberta.
Dr. Helmut Reichenbächer, Associate Professor
Faculty of Arts and Science
"Unveiling Censorship's Impact: Prototyping AI-Powered Data Aggregation for German Theatre History (1933-1945)"
The primary objective of this new research is to develop a digitization method to aggregate data from theatre performance documents of the 1920s through 1940s by combining advanced OCR and AI-based digitization methods. This new approach will speed up data aggregation exponentially and increase data accuracy to deepen our understanding of the effects of censorship and the political suppression of cultural programming.
This project builds on existing scholarship in cultural history, musicology, and theatre studies. While previous research has surveyed the cultural politics of the period or focused on the fate of individual works and creators, this new direction introduces a novel data-driven, macro-analytical approach.
Lauchlan Reid, Associate Professor
Faculty of Design
"The Sustainable Colour Lab Connection Grant Seed Funding"
The seed funding will support the development of a larger SSHRC Connections Grant application by hiring and training two student researchers who will play a critical role in helping prepare the SSHRC proposal and subsequent Canada Foundation for Innovation grant application aimed at supporting infrastructure upgrades in the Sustainable Colour Lab.
The Sustainable Colour Lab, launched in the fall of 2024, responds urgently to the environmental and cultural harms caused by plastic-based pigments and petrochemical materials in art and design, promoting sustainable alternatives rooted in Indigenous knowledge and ethical sourcing. This work is needed now as the creative sector faces increasing pressure to reduce its ecological footprint and embrace more responsible material practices.
Ala Roushan, Associate Professor
Faculty of Design
"Shaping Atmospheres: A Geoengineering Model of an Entangled Planet"
This project will develop a strategy for mapping and diagramming geolocations around the world that are either undergoing geoengineering initiatives or are key target sites for future interventions. Funding will support the creation of a prototype for an interactive data visualization platform that maps key sites of geoengineering proposals and already implemented interventions globally.
As proposals for large-scale climate engineering gain traction, it becomes urgent to engage with these technologies not merely as meteorological solutions, but as deeply political, ecological and ethical challenges. This project aims to reframe geoengineering through a critical artistic lens, moving beyond technocratic narratives to foreground planetary entanglement, lived geographies and speculative futures.
Dr. Leah Shenandoah, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Design
"O'whahsa' Revisited: Protective Hood Design as Indigenous Research-Creation"
The project builds on Dr. Shenandoah’s continuing a long-term research-creation inquiry into Indigenous design, material culture, and protection. The current phase involves developing a wearable hood using EMF-shielding fabrics in response to the growing impact of globalization, wireless technology, and environmental toxicity on human bodies-particularly those who are racialized, disabled, or otherwise vulnerable.
In undertaking this project, Dr. Shenandoah draws on Haudenosaunee worldviews in which garments are not only functional but sacred carriers of medicine, meaning, and memory. In this work, clothing becomes both a shelter and a statement. The hood acts as a metaphor for protection and resistance. Unlike hoods that have been stigmatized through racialized surveillance, this one is designed to safeguard the wearer spiritually, emotionally, and physically.
The project responds to critical needs in both Indigenous research and contemporary fashion studies, offering a counter-narrative to settler-colonial design paradigms and environmental disregard. It will contribute to knowledge in the fields of wearable technology, Indigenous futurism, and sustainable fashion.
