UBC Journalism professor Candis Callison has been named a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellow.
The fellowships are awarded to accomplished scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are recognized for their productivity, their commitment to public scholarship, and their ability to devise innovative solutions to issues facing Canada and the world.
Fellows receive up to $50,000 per year over a three-year term, plus travel funds, to support their research and promote scholarly engagement and collaboration within the Trudeau Foundation community of Scholars, Fellows, and Mentors.
An Associate Professor at the UBC School of Journalism, Callison is on leave as the Pathy Distinguished Visitor in Canadian Studies at Princeton University until June 2019.
Callison is the coauthor, with her UBC colleague Mary Lynn Young, of a forthcoming book on journalism, gender, race, and colonialism entitled Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (Oxford University Press).
She is also the author of How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014). Callison is Tahltan, and a regular contributor on the podcast Media Indigena.
Dr. Callison’s research and teaching are focused on changes to media practices and platforms, journalism ethics, the role of social movements in public discourse, and understanding how issues related to science and technology become meaningful for diverse publics.
Prior to her academic work, Callison produced, wrote, and reported for television, the Internet, and radio in Canada (CBC, CTV) and the United States (Lycos, Tech TV). She was the original host and co-creator of First Story, the first news and current affairs series on Indigenous issues to be broadcast nationally in Canada on CTV; it was later syndicated to APTN. For her early concurrent work in media convergence, she was profiled in the 2003 book, Technology with Curves: Women Reshaping the Digital Landscape.
Her independently produced film, Traditional Renaissance was included in UBC Museum of Anthropology’s 2003-04 exhibition on Tahltan culture, “Mehodihi: Our Great Ancestors Lived that Way.”
This year’s Trudeau Fellows will produce and share curriculum for scholars and prepare seminars focused on this year’s scientific theme, Power & Knowledge.
