No. 535 - May 21, 2025

  • Coming Events:

    - FIMSWrites - Summer Edition
    - Workshop 2: Preparing Applications for Tri-Agency Scholarships (SSHRC/OGS)

  • Important Dates:

    - Friday, June 6, 2025 - Meeting of Senate (1:30 PM, Zoom)
    - Wednesday, June 11, 2025 - FIMS Convocation (FNB reception 10:30 AM - 12 PM)
    - Thursday, June 26, 2025 - Meeting of the Board of Governors (10 AM, WIRB)

  • News & Announcements:

    - Inspiring Minds - Grad Student Research Showcase
    - Volunteer opportunities at the upcoming Toronto Comics Arts Festival

    Awards & Accomplishments:

    - Chris Arsenault
    - Caitlin Burd
    - Chris Circelli
    - Sarah Cornwell
    - Camryn Farquharson
    - Kieran Fong
    - Anthony Germain (MA'94, Journalism)
    - Briar Grayson
    - Andrew Lewis
    - Alex Mayhew
    - Josiane N'tchoreret-Mbiamany
    - Angela Pollak (PhD'15, LIS)
    - John Reed
    - Sandra Smeltzer

  • Publications & Presentations:

    - Melissa Adler
    - Olateju Jumoke Ajanaku
    - Juan Bello
    - Lucia Cedeira Serantes
    - Busra Copuroglu
    - Sara Falahatpisheh
    - Giada Ferrucci
    - Lyndsay Foisey
    - Annie Kavanagh (MLIS'24)
    - Olivia Kerr (MLIS'24)
    - Santasil Mallik
    - Elizabeth Marshall (MLIS'02)
    - Selma Purac
    - Anabel Quan-Haase
    - Arathy Sivasubramaniam (MLIS'23)
    - Sarah Smith
    - Bri Watson

  • In the Media:

    - Jacob Anstey
    - Chris Arsenault
    - Norma Coates (with Kadie Philps)
    - Kayla Foisy
    - Zaria Lewis-Dacres
    - Selma Purac
    - Sophia Ratanshi
    - Emilia Sferrazza
    - Sarah Smith
    - Luke Stark
    - Tom Wrobel

  • Additional Activities of Note:

    - Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador team unveil mural

  • News from the FIMS Grad Library:

    - Summer Hours
    - Welcome Summer 2025 SLA Team
    - Upcoming Events at the Library

  • Next Issue:


Coming Events

FIMSWrites - Summer Term Edition
Wednesdays
9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Attend in-person: FNB 4110
Attend online: Check your Western email for the Zoom link (or contact Pam McKenzie)
Do you expect to have assignment, story, article, report, thesis, and/or book writing deadlines coming up in the Fall term? Does having other people writing around you help keep you on-task? Then join us for FIMSWrites, an informal initiative to provide some solidarity in the sometimes-solitary writing process. What it is: a group of people sitting silently together working on their individual writing projects, a mid-morning coffee, snack, and socializing break. What it's not: a writing tutorial or workshop. Open to FIMS faculty, librarians, postdocs and grad students who have writing to work on.

Workshop 2: Preparing Applications for Tri-Agency Scholarships (SSHRC/OGS)
Monday, June 9, 2025
12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Attend in-person: FNB 4130
Attend online: Zoom (check your Western email for the link)
For FIMS doctoral students. Organized by Melissa Adler, Media Studies and LIS Grad Chair. Lunch will be provided. 
 


Important Dates

- Friday, June 6, 2025 - Meeting of Senate (1:30 PM, Zoom)
- Wednesday, June 11, 2025 - FIMS Convocation (FNB reception 10:30 AM - 12 PM)
- Thursday, June 26, 2025 - Meeting of the Board of Governors (10 AM, WIRB)


News & Announcements

Inspiring Minds - Grad Student Research Showcase
Inspiring Minds is a non-competitive showcase celebrating the research, scholarship and creative activity pursued by Western's master's and doctoral students. Inspiring Minds has one rule: graduate students are asked to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in any language in no more than 150 written words. Students can also include supplementary digital files to support their work including music, images, or video clips. Submit your work by June 6, 2025. For more information, visit the Inspiring Minds website.

Volunteer opportunities at the upcoming Toronto Comics Arts Festival
If you're a student who loves comics, there are volunteer opportunities open at the upcoming Toronto Comic Arts Festival (June 7-8). You can help with set up and tear down of the festival space, facilitate programming by supporting presenters and providing AV support, crowd control, and much more. For more information, visit the TCAF volunteer website. 


Awards & Accomplishments

Assistant Professor and MMJC Chair Chris Arsenault and collaborator Josette Lafleur were awarded the Michener-L. Richard O'Hagan Fellowship for Journalism Education for their project "How They Did It," which will explore how leading journalists tackle investigative reporting.

HIS PhD candidate Caitlin Burd successfully defended her thesis titled An Analysis of Canada's Approach to Addressing Gender-Based Violence: The Impact of Framings of Gender-Based Violence and Solutions in Policy and Funding on April 9, 2025.

Graduate Student Services Manager Chris Circelli was awarded the Fantastic FIMS award for the Winter 2025 term. The award is given out by the MLISSC. Past recipients can be seen online.

LIS PhD candidate Sarah Cornwell successfully defended her thesis titled Search Language Selection in Context: the information practice of established active multilinguals in Southern Ontario, Canada on April 14, 2025.

MMJC students Camryn Farquharson and Josiane N'tchoreret-Mbiamany were selected for the 2025 CBC News Summer Scholarship program. Fourteen aspiring journalists were selected to this year's roster. The students will complete a professional internship with CBC News over the course of the summer term.

MMJC student Kieran Fong's essay 'We must rethink local journalism' was selected as the recipient of this year's Haak Saan Responsible Journalism Scholarship. The essay was published on CBC London's website.

Anthony Germain (MA'94, Journalism) was elected as a Liberal MP during the April Federal election. Winning by 12 votes, he will represent Terra Nova-The Peninsulas in Newfoundland and Labrador. Before entering politics, Germain was a longtime broadcaster and journalist for CBC.

MLIS student Briar Grayson was awarded the Spirit of Librarianship award for the Winter 2025 term. The award is given out by the MLISSC. Past recipients can be seen online.

FIMS Lecturer Andrew Lewis has been selected by the International Poster Biennial of Bolivia 2025 exhibition. Three posters were chosen out of 12,648 entries from 90 countries in the categories of Cultural, Advertising and the theme of Second Life of Objects. Lewis is the only Canadian designer in the exhibition. BICeBé is one of the most important graphic design, communication and visual arts events in Latin America.

LIS PhD candidate Alex Mayhew successfully defended his thesis titled Phylomemetic Cataloguing: An Optimistic Proposal for a Radical Bibliographic Catalogue on April 21, 2025.

Angela Pollak (PhD'15, LIS) was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal for her work supporting accessibility and inclusion. The Coronation Medal is awarded yearly to people who have made a valuable contribution to their country.

FIMS Lecturer John Reed has been appointed to the Contract Academic Staff Committee for The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), a federation of independent associations and trade unions representing approximately 70,000 teachers, librarians, researchers and other academic professionals and general staff at 120 universities and colleges across Canada. The role entails advocating for contract academic staff issues within and outside of CAUT, as well as providing general support and information sharing to members.

Associate Professor Sandra Smeltzer was awarded the 2024/2025 Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching by Western University. The awards were announced in an articled titled "Western Awards for Excellence in Teaching recognize educators across campus," published by Western News.


Publications & Presentations

Associate Professor Melissa Adler will participate in the panel at the Canadian Association of Information Science (CAIS), "Knowledge Organization in a Dangerous Time," with Julia Bullard, Stacy Allison-Cassin, Sharon Farnel, and Ali Shiri. The conference will be held online and in person. Virtual attendance is free, so you are invited to participate in the discussion. Please register here: https://cais2025.ca/registration/ 

Professor Adler will also be in a panel at the Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS), June 2-5, 2025, at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. The panel is "Algorithms, Archives, and Authority: The Power of Classification in the Age of AI," with Joacim Hansson, Jack Andersen, David Beer, Karen Louise Grova Søilen, and Melanie Feinberg.

Olateju Jumoke Ajanaku, former FIMS Postdoctoral Associate, will present a paper entitled "Organizational Culture as a Catalyst for Effective Knowledge Management in Healthcare Deliver among Nurses: Exploring the Link Between Culture and Knowledge Processes in Nursing Practice" at the upcoming CAIS 2025 conference.

Assistant Professor Juan Bello produced and directed a film titled Never Forgotten, which will be presented at Vancouver's VIFF Centre on June 3 to mark the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the On-To-Ottawa Trek. The production was supported by the Workers’ History Museum, Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CPUW), BC Labour Heritage Centre, the London Arts Council and Library and Archives Canada (DigiLab), and the event is supported by UWOFA–University of Western Ontario Faculty Association.

Professor Bello also served as the Archival Researcher for the film We Lend a Hand: The Forgotten Story of Ontario Farmettes, which will premiere at the Wolf Performance Hall on June 6, and Revolution Remix: Systematic Racism and Black Empowerment Movements in 1960s Canada, an educational resource developed by the Canadian Museum of History.

Assistant Professor Lucia Cedeira Serantes, in collaboration with Annie Kavanaugh (MLIS'24, now University of Windsor), Arathy Sivasubramaniam (MLIS'23, now Mississauga Public Library), and Olivia Kerr (MLIS'24, now London Catholic School Board), will be delivering a workshop about comics advocacy for librarians and educators at the Librarians and Educators Day (LED) as part of the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF) on June 6. Attendence is free but registration is required.

FIMS instructor Busra Copuroglu published a short book review of Carolin Gebauer's Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel for the Journal of 21st Century Writings.

FIMS Postdoctoral Associate Giada Ferrucci published the following article:

Ansari, E. A., & Ferrucci, G. (2025). Faith, Trauma, Resistance, and Resilience in the Revolutionary Songs of Civil War El Salvador. Journal of the American Musicological Society, 78(1), 53-91.

Sara Falahatpisheh, Media Studies PhD candidate, presented or co-presented the following conference talks:

Sara (Zahra) Falahatpisheh presenting “International Students’ Challenges, Social Media use and Adaptation” at the 12th European Conference on Social Media (ECSM) in Porto, Portugal on May 22.

Molly-Gloria Patel, Jinman Zhang, Zahra Falahatpisheh, and Anabel Quan-Haase presenting "Influencers' use of social media for feminist digital activism: Investigating Iran's 2022/2023 protests" at The Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) in Toronto on May 31.

Alanna Acchione and Zahra Falahatpisheh presenting “Trad Attraction: A Thematic Analysis of Visual and Discursive Practices in Tradwife Recruitment” at the Canadian Sociology Association (CSA) in Toronto on June 4.

Lyndsay Foisey, HIS PhD candidate, published the following conference paper:

Kacmarova, K., McPhail, H., Kothari, A., James, L,., Foisey, L., Donelle, L., & Bauer, M. (2025). Comparing Models for Sentiment Analysis of Tweets in Response to Public Health Announcements During the Pandemic. In: Alsadoon, A., Shenavarmasouleh, F., Amirian, S., Ghareh Mohammadi, F., Arabnia, H.R., Deligiannidis, L. (eds) Health Informatics and Medical Systems and Biomedical Engineering. CSCE 2024. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 2259. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85908-3_14

Media Studies PhD candidate Santasil Mallik's video essay, The Fool of Posillipo and Other Stories, was screened at the 20th edition of Experiments in Cinema program from April 16-20 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, and online at the festival's channel from April 28 to May 10.

Santasil also published the following book review:

Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, Kimberly Juanita Brown (2024), Philosophy of Photography, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 135-141.

Elizabeth Marshall (MLIS'02) co-authored an article titled "Business Library Co-op Experiences: Takeaways and Advice from Participants," published in Creative Library Practice on March 31.

Assistant Professor Selma Purac published the following article:

“’Things in the mist!’: Stephen King’s Cosmic Horror and the Disruption of Consumerism.” The Weird: A Companion. Eds. Carl H. Sederholm and Kristopher Woofter. New York: Peter Lang, 2025. 307-317.

Professor Anabel Quan-Haase gave the following presentation:

Invited speaker: Quan-Haase, A. (April 22, 2025). “Digital Inequalities: Aging and Social Connectedness in an Increasingly Online World Department of Sociology Speaker Series, McMaster University and Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship.

Associate Professor Sarah Smith authored the following publications:

New book: S. Smith, Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America, UBC Press, 2025.

S. Smith, “Tax Canadian movies? Why culture has always been at the centre of trade wars,” The Conversation, May 13, 2025.

Assistant Professor Bri Watson will host an unofficial discussion about Canadian InfoSci/GLAMS Futures, which will include a conversation about accreditation, as the CAIS conference. The session will be held (virtually and in person) over the lunch hour on May 27 (9:30 am Pacific / 10:30 am Mountain / 11:30 am Central / 12:30 pm Eastern). The password will be sent out on the day of the event so sign up if you'd like to attend virtually on Zoom.


In the Media

Jacob Anstey, FIMS Media Specialist, was featured in an article titled, "After one-year hiatus, London TikToker with 18M likes is back online sharing takeaways," published by CBC News on April 28.

Assistant Professor Chris Arsenault is quoted in an article titled, "Meta news ban intensifying Canadians' legacy media break," published by France24 on April 15.

Associate Professor Norma Coates was a guest on Level the Playing Field, as six-part podcast about economics, equity, women, and work hosted by Kadie Philp (MA'07, Media Studies). Professor Coates appears in an episode titled "Punk, Pop, and Pay Gaps: Gender in the Music Industry," aired on May 13.

Current MACS students Kayla Foisy, Zaria Lewis-Dacres, and Emilia Sferrazza, along with FIMS Academic Advisor Tom Wrobel, all appeared in an article titled, "Student Learning Groups program helps first-years thrive," published by Western News on April 16.

Sophia Ratanshi, MACS student and FIMSSC president, is quoted in an article titled "USC, provosts talk Navitas partnership" published by the Gazette on April 3.

Associate Professor Sarah Smith was a guest on the podcast What's Old is News in an episode titled "Free Trade & Cultural Diplomacy." The episode aired on May 6.

Assistant Professor Luke Stark joined 16 CBC Morning radio shows including CBC London Morning on May 14 to discuss the newly appointed Minister of AI and Digital Innovation.




Additional Activities of Note


Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador team unveils mural
The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador team unveiled a large mural at the Sumpul River Massacre memorial. The mural is the final component in the memorial, which the team has been working on in collaboration with massacres survivors and Salvadoran communities since 2017. The architectural design was co-created in collaboration with Belgian and Salvadoran architects, Harold Fallon (KU Leuven), Evelia Macal, Thomas Montulet, and Roberto Urbina and Salvadoran artists Lourdes Calero and Miguel Mira (University of El Salvador). The mural itself was co-created with survivors of the massacre by the Chalatenango artists from Colectivo Matiz. The entire memorial project was supported in part by a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, Western University, KU Leuven, AgwA architects (Belgium), and Asociación Sumpul (El Salvador). The team is also grateful for significant financial and in-kind contributions from LiUNA Local 183, LiUNA OPDC, the UNDP, Asociación Sumpul, the Loretto Sisters of Toronto, the Arthur Fallon Memorial Fund, Hermana Teresa García Fund, Brussels Cathedral, CCR, CRIPDES, SalvAide, FutureWatch, ASALCA – the Salvadoran Canadian Association. See photos: Image 1, Image 2, Image 3.

News from the FIMS Grad Library

Summer Hours at the Library

Mondays to Thursdays: 10am-7pm
Fridays: 10am-4pm
(Closed Saturdays, Sundays and University Holidays)

Welcome Summer 2025 SLA Team

We are delighted to welcome (and welcome back) the following students to our part-time, Student Library Assistant (SLA) team here in the FGL this term: Benjamin Hartmans, Briar Grayson, Emma Schindler-Wood, Isobel Flindall, Meaghan Mosier-Farquharson, and Settia (Miyang) Roh. You will see Student Library Assistants at the Service Desk in the library, and they are here to help you with library resources, services, facilities and programming.

Upcoming Events at the Library

The FGL hosts workshops, lectures, and community events each term to support graduate teaching, learning, and research. Events are posted to our website (https://lib.fims.uwo.ca/events/) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/fimsgradlib/)

Board Game Night at the Library, Hosted by Matt Ward

Join us for 🎲Board Game Night! 🎲
Grab your friends and join us for an evening of fun and games!

✔️ Three tables, three challenges:
🔹 Easy-to-learn games for beginners
🔹 Medium-level adventures for casual players
🔹 Advanced-level games play

✨ Do you have a favourite board game? Bring it along and share the fun!

📅 Date: Thursday, June 12, 2025
🕒 Time: 5-8 PM
📍 Location: FIMS Graduate Library
🍿 Snacks provided

Come solo, or bring a team- there’s a seat for everyone!

The Time Vault - How to Locate and Access Canadian Historical Data (Pre-1980)

Join MLIS candidate Settia Roh as she teaches us how to find pre-1980s Canadian historical census and non-census data, and how to navigate key publications from Statistics Canada and its predecessors. We will learn how to use essential research tools and resources for historical data including the Historical Catalogue, the Internet Archive, the Government of Canada publications website, and guides and tools from the Statistics Canada Library and Library and Archives Canada. All students are welcome, whether they aspire to be librarians helping others in finding historical data or plan to use these resources for their own research projects.

Friday, June 20, 2025
12:30pm – 1:30pm
FIMS Graduate Library Room 3020D/E
Zoom: https://westernuniversity.zoom.us/j/91811824672 
Passcode: 1980


Next Issue


The FIMS Bulletin is your source for news, announcements, and events pertaining to FIMS graduate programs. Submissions from the FIMS community are always welcome and may be sent via e-mail to fims-communications@uwo.ca.

This is the first of four summer issues of the FIMS Bulletin. Future publication dates include June 18, July 9, and August 6.