Centre for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Arts and Sciences (CICAS)

1. To provide an intellectual, innovative base for connecting with scholars locally, nationally, and worldwide.
2. To cultivate trans-disciplinary, local, and international research at Nipissing University.
3. To combine new models of knowledge interfacing and digital interaction with leading-edge research that connects creative pedagogy with critical inquiry, but also mobilizes critical inquiry and research across cultural and economic divides.
4. To shed light on disciplinary commonalities without diluting individual disciplines.
5. To encourage creative approaches to pedagogy and learning.
6. To emphasize diversity and equality.
7. To foster a new generation of undergraduate and graduate student researchers.

Workshops, Seminars, and Talk Series

Workshops, seminars, and talk series are organized around specific themes and goals. These include research in pedagogy and pedagogical innovation. An essential part of this initiative is also community outreach.

Symposium

The centre’s international symposia will be held annually (see more details for annual themes and calls for papers).

Grant Applications

The centre’s mandate is to pursue Tri-Council and international grants and thus encourage collaborative research and networking among scholars at Nipissing and beyond.

The role of the centre is not limited to the pursuit of Tri-Council grants only.

As specified in the objectives below, the centre’s role is to remain a crucial research hub in the region whose function, however, will not be limited to Canadian collaborative networks.

The Centre has 7 long-term objectives:

1. To create strategic partnerships and research clusters that stem from both within and outside the university in order to establish a research base for Nipissing scholars to share their pursuit of knowledge and critical inquiry. These partnerships will also facilitate applying for national, Tri-Council, and international grants via research partnerships with regional, national, and international scholars and professionals.
2. To oversee and liaise research-based initiatives that encourage inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary lines of inquiry, combining specialization with collaborative communication and digital mobilization of knowledge on the local, provincial, federal, and international level.
3. To engage NU graduate and undergraduate students in the centre’s initiatives and thus foster a new generation of innovative young scholars.
4. To establish local, inter-city, as well as international research partnerships that foster the importance of community outreach, collaborative networking, creative innovation, and ethical dialogue.
5. To position Nipissing as a strategic, research-driven player in the rise of the digital age university.
6. To encourage research output and publish annual proceedings stemming from the centre’s initiatives.
7. To serve as a strategic research hub for the Near North and beyond.

• Cyborg identities, contemporary society, and literature 
• Ethnologies, history, memory, and digital culture 
• Digital media and state violence 
• Digital media and human rights violations 
• Power, violence, and the Internet 
• Space, community, and digital humanities 
• The future of humanities education in the digital age 
• Education and technology

Digital Culture and Community Cluster Coordinator

Dr. Sarah Winters

• Dr. Sarah Winters is an Associate Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University. She is the coordinator of the Digital Culture and Community Cluster. The Digital Culture and Community cluster embraces all research into both the use of digital tools to ask old questions about culture and community in new ways and the use of traditional methods of inquiry in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences to interrogate the digital world.
• Dr. Winters teaches a course on Fan Vids that counts as an elective towards the Digital Humanities Certificate offered jointly through the Departments of English and Computer Science. She has published articles on vidding (the practice of making fan vids) in Transformative Works and Cultures and Children's Literature in Education, and is collaborating with Susan Srigley of Religions and Cultures in the areas of digital pedagogy and the relationship between fandom and religion.

• Culture and/of the North 
• Creativity and the culture of the North 
• History, nursing, and gender 
• Gender, poverty, and history 

Culture, Creativity, and/of the North Coordinator

Dr. Laurie Kruk

• Dr. Laurie Kruk is an Associate Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University. She is the coordinator of the Culture, Creativity, and/of the North. How ‘North’ IS ‘True North’ and how do we embrace that long-standing identification in this globalized Twenty-First Century? Nordicity has historically been about resources, space, silence, potential—perhaps creativity—less so about culture. Northern indigenous cultures, for instance, have often been ignored, supplanted or destroyed by invading outsiders, colonizers, southerners. So, how do we create a truly democratic and creative Northern culture which is both strong and free(ing)?
• Dr. Kruk teaches Canadian Literature, Native Literature, women’s writing, and the short story at Nipissing. She has published The Voice is the Story: Conversations with Canadian Writers of Short Fiction (2003) and is currently working on a book on the Canadian short story’s “double voice.” She has also published three collections of poetry: Theories of the World (1992), Loving the Alien (2006), My Mother Did Not Tell Stories (2012). As a long-time member of the local “Conspiracy of Three” reading series, Kruk enjoys engaging “town” and “gown.” In May 2996 and 1997, as a new arrival at Nipissing, she co-organized two interdisciplinary conferences “Visions of the North, Voices of the North” with Professors Tony Blackbourn (Geography) and Bill Plumstead (English) and was a member of the organizing committee for a third (“The North in Film”) in May 1998.
   

• Environment and the North 
• Water governance and First Nations water rights 
• Leadership in health care 
• Family health in the North 
• Applications of information technologies to e-health 

Health and Technology Coordinator

Dr. Haibin Zhu

• Dr. Haibin Zhu is a Full Professor and the coordinator of the Computer Science Program. He is also the Founding Director of Collaborative Systems Laboratory at Nipissing University and the coordinator of the Environmental Health and Technology cluster. The eHealth and Technology Cluster actively engages information technology (IT) to improve both quality and access to health care for the people. Its aim is to investigate the related challenges in health sectors that might be solved or supported with IT.
• He has published 130+ research papers, four books, and two book chapters. He is a senior member of IEEE and is serving and served as co-chair of the technical committee of Distributed Intelligent Systems of IEEE SMC Society, guest (co-) editor for 3 special issues of prestigious journals, and organization chair for many IEEE conferences. He was a Program Committee (PC) Chair for 17th IEEE Int’l Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, Whistler, BC, Canada, June 27- 29, 2013. He also served as PC members for 50+ academic conferences. He is a founding researcher of Role-Based Collaboration and Adaptive Collaboration. He is the recipient of the chancellor’s award for excellence in research (2011) and two research achievement awards from Nipissing University (2006-2007, 2012-2013), the IBM Eclipse Innovation Grant Awards (2004, 2005), the Best Paper Award from the 11th ISPE Int’l Conf. on Concurrent Engineering (ISPE/CE2004), the Educator’s Fellowship of OOPSLA’03, a 2nd class National Award for Education Achievement (1997), and three 1st Class Ministerial Research Achievement Awards from China (1997, 1994, and 1991).
• His research interests include Collaboration Theory, Technologies, Systems, and Applications (Role-Based Collaboration and Adaptive Collaboration), Human-Machine Systems, CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work), Multi-Agent Systems, Software Engineering, and Distributed Intelligent Systems.