Two SSHRC Destination Horizon grants awarded to Prentice Institute in first semester of grant program

It has been one year since Canada was listed as Horizon Europe “associated country” (non-European Union countries that are part of the European Research Area). Canadian institutions can now lead and join international consortia with European and other partners under the Pillar II research clusters “to tackle some of the most pressing global challenges today”[1]—a goal that mirrors exactly the mandate of the Prentice Institute. 

Horizon Europe (HE) is the world’s largest research collaboration program, and through HE grants Canadian institutions now have the opportunity to foster research cooperation with Europe for ambitious programs of research.  To foster new and existing partnerships towards the development of research networks and consortia in anticipation of HE calls for proposals, SSHRC opened the Destination Horizon (DH) grants opportunity in 2025.  Dr. Lars Hallstrom and Dr. Andrea Cuéllar (Director and Associate Director of the Prentice Institute) and their research teams have been awarded two SSHRC DH grants to build programs of research in the areas of migration and socioecological restoration, respectively. 

In partnership with the University of Helsinki, Dr. Hallstrom’s project, entitled “Involuntary Staying and the Rural Problematique: Learning to Leave but only able to Stay,” explores the impacts of population immobility in rural Canada and beyond.  Engaging with lived experiences of “involuntary staying,” this project investigates how rurality intersects with other systemic, socio-economic inequities that impact mobility, such as the exploitation of temporary migrants, the impacts of Intimate Partner Violence, and the increase in homelessness and housing insecurity. Understanding how and why rural populations stay in place is necessary for building healthy and sustainable communities in which residents chose to stay rather than staying because they cannot leave. While much attention has been paid to population attraction and retention in rural places across Canada and Europe, little focus has been placed on understanding why individuals might be staying in these places, even if they want to move on, and what the immediate and long-term effects of involuntary staying might be. In our globalized world where mobility is conceptualized as the norm, this project invests in understanding the local dynamics of involuntary staying at the neighborhood, community and regional levels in an effort to improve the health and wellbeing of rural and smaller places.   

Dr. Cuéllar’s Project, “Biodiversity Management and Food Security through Culturally Grounded Socioecological Restoration” is concerned with Indigenous-led socioecological restoration, and the concomitant benefits to biodiversity conservation and food security and sovereignty.  While the place of Indigenous Knowledge Systems is increasingly referenced in global and local scale initiatives, there continues to be an overreliance (in the field of restoration ecology) on the Natural Sciences, and an unbalanced emphasis on target-driven biological regeneration, but Cuéllar says, “the Social Sciences have an important contribution to make to this question, ecological restoration in Indigenous territories must be grounded in the knowledge systems and culturally situated goals of Indigenous rightsholders such that restoration amounts to socioecological transformation.”  This work with the Quijos Nation of the Ecuadorian Amazon aligns with the European Commission’s Amazonia+ Programme, tasked to improve the capacity to reduce forest degradation and improve biodiversity in the Amazon by enhancing, among others, the participation of Indigenous peoples in environmental and forest governance policies and mechanisms.  Academic partners in the project include anthropologists, sociologists and human geographers from the Universidad San Franciso de Quito (USFQ) in Ecuador and GAIAS Europa (the USFQ’s academic hub in Spain), the University of Oxford (UK) and York University (Canada).   

Individually and together these two research initiatives foster collaboration locally and across continents, and among organizations in various sectors beyond academia, while contributing to student training and to the vibrancy of the Social Science research community at the University—all of which encapsulate the mission of the Prentice Institute as a Social Science research hub. 

[1] Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada Newsletter. August 2025. p.1.