We would like to extend a warm congratulations to Dr. Luanne Sinnamon, STOREE co-investigator, and Dr. Lisa Nathan, co-leads of the project Understanding personal and public sense making in response to the climate crisis. The project received an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for a period of four years.
To understand how communities throughout British Columbia are navigating the climate crisis, the project will collaborate with the British Columbia Library Association and librarians in three communities throughout the province. Together, the research team and libraries will co-design, implement, and evaluate programming that fosters community sense making and action on the climate crisis.
“As we have seen with the COVID-19 ‘infodemic,’ sense making in the context of a crisis can lead to heightened confusion, anxiety, and polarization,” the team writes. “If we aspire to foster resilient and compassionate communities—well positioned to respond to our worsening climate crisis—we need to better understand and collaboratively shape information infrastructures and information practices that support sense making, meaning making, and collective action.”
One of the goals of the project is to co-produce educational modules and toolkits that libraries can steward beyond its conclusion. These elements of knowledge exchange and community engagement are a driving force behind the project and take inspiration from work carried about by Dr. Sinnamon’s work as part of the STOREE team.
“Everything I learned about community engaged research and knowledge exchange through my participation in the STOREE project prepared me for this new initiative,” Dr. Sinnamon shares.
We are so excited to hear about the ripples of STOREE’s impact and look forward to watching this work unfold!
You can find the full announcement from SSHRC here.