FEDERATION FOR THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
2025 Canada Prizes Awards Announced, Shining Spotlight on Five Exceptional Canadian Scholarly Books

The authors of five Canadian scholarly books are the recipients of the prestigious 2025 Canada Prizes award and $4,000 each in recognition of their inspiring, impactful and transformative work.

The awards, given by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences - a national non-profit voice for researchers in the humanities and social sciences in Canada - will be presented to the winners in a ceremony at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Congress 2025) on June 3. They recognize outstanding authors and works that provoke and inform national conversations on important topics and draw attention to the contribution of scholarship to Canadian society.

"At a time of deep social and political change, the Canada Prizes remind us why the humanities and social sciences matter," said Karine Morin, President and CEO of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, in congratulating the 2025 Canada Prizes winners. "These winning books deepen our understanding of the world we live in, shedding light on overlooked histories, challenging assumptions, and showcasing the revealing power of research in addressing the critical issues of our time."

The awards - made possible thanks to the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) - celebrate a range of voices, from first-time authors to established scholars, while championing French and English language works and amplifying a broad scope of perspectives across disciplines, in line with the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences' commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization. The Prizes are independently juried by the Scholarly Book Awards Academic Council.

The five 2025 Canada Prizes Award winners are:

Jen Rinaldi, associate professor in legal studies at Ontario Tech University and Kate Rossiter, associate professor in health studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, for their book Population Control: Theorizing Institutional Violence (McGill Queen's University Press). This eye-opening work - based on years of research that included archival investigations and interviews with institutional residents and survivors of such places as emergency shelters, asylums, prisons, and residential schools - sheds light on how violence is baked into the DNA of how our society manages oppressed groups of people. The authors argue that the kind of violence that happens in institutions comes out of not just brick and mortar spaces, but rather, a way of thinking about how to manage groups that are socially loathed. This often results in abusive acts such as giving people a number rather than a name, solitary confinement, force feeding, beatings, and sexual assaults. "Social loathing starts when we stop understanding people as human beings and start seeing them as a social issue that needs to be dealt with," said Rossiter, whose unease was sparked at a young age watching her uncle who had Down syndrome spend his life in an institution. With many signs indicating that institutionalization is on the rise in North America - from proposals to expand group home living and create migrant detention centres, to repurposing asylums for those with mental health and addiction issues - Rinaldi explained that "our hope is that this book will heighten awareness of this predictable social phenomenon and make inroads toward preventing its reoccurrence."

Julien Simard, postdoctoral researcher at CREMIS and Université de Montréal for his book Vieillissement et crise du logement : gentrification, précarité et résistance (Aging and the Housing Crisis: Gentrification, Precarity and Resistance) (Les presses de l'Université de Montréal). While gentrification of neighbourhoods is often embraced for its economic benefits, there's a fallout from this trend that largely goes unnoticed: the displacement of elderly tenants. Using Montreal as an example, Simard explores the consequences of gentrification among older Canadian tenants, who - as often long-term lessees paying below-market-value rent - are being driven from their homes. Through a global literature review, on-the-ground assessments and interviews with older tenants, he discovered that seniors - especially women - often experience harassment from their landlords that aim to displace them by force. "It's important to see behind closed doors and grasp the violence that can be ingrained in relationships like those of landlord-tenant that aren't visible," he said. Regardless of formal procedures in place intended to protect tenants, Simard found that few seniors have the skills and experience to fight for their rights in what can be a grueling legal process. "While public policies in Canada and Quebec promote aging in place, these policies often forget about older tenants, who are prone to eviction and displacement to the outskirts, with many ending up homeless," he said. Simard explained that, even more than losing their homes, older Canadians are most impacted by losing their routines and social connections in the neighbourhoods where they planted roots. "If we want to keep intergenerational, diverse bustling city centres, we have to implement structural solutions for affordable housing right now or we risk losing older people from the city centres," he concluded.

Dr. Candace Brunette-Debassige, Assistant Professor in Indigenous Relations at Laurentian University, for her book Tricky Grounds: Indigenous Women's Experiences in Canadian University Administration (University of Regina Press). Following the 2015 release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report, many Canadian universities grappled with how to respond to calls to action in education, resulting in the hiring of many Indigenous people to senior administrative positions. Interestingly, many Indigenous women took on these leadership roles - traditionally held by white men. Brunette-Debassige spent two years (2017-2019) interviewing some of these women to gain insight into their experiences. The outcome is this eye-opening work that reveals the challenges these women, as well as Brunette-Debassige herself, faced during this early period of institutional transformation in an effort to move universities into deeper levels of Indigenous inclusion in areas like curriculum and research - from lacking authority, budget and personnel to support this growing mandate and acting on behalf of their communities, to struggling to be heard, or being dismissed as biased or too political. "They acted as a bridge between the universities and Indigenous communities, but they were also working on a dangerous border that was almost impossible to bridge because each world stems from very different ways of working," Brunette-Debassige said, explaining that colonialism is steeped into the history, structures and policies of universities, where many early residential school clergy were trained and where Indigenous peoples weren't legally permitted to attend without giving up treaty rights to their land. "The universities also tended to position Indigenous women leaders as the symbol of change, communicating through their public affairs offices that they had achieved reconciliation, when in reality the women's stories said something very different. They said they were still working within a very colonial and bureaucratic system that was difficult to change and meaningfully include Indigenous knowledge and peoples," she said. While universities today have made some good progress in Indigenous inclusion, they still have a long way to go before true reconciliation and the upholding of Indigenous rights can happen, Brunette-Debassige emphasized.

Pierre Lavoie, historian and professor in the Department of Humanities at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières, for his book entitled Mille après mille: Célébrité et migrations dans le Nord-Est américain (Mile After Mile: Celebrity and Migrations in the American Northeast) (Éditions du Boréal). In a unique twist, Lavoie explores the aftermath of the great labour migrations between Quebec and the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by following the paths of interwar popular artists Mary Travers (known as La Bolduc), Rudy Vallée and Jean Grimaldi. All three - migrants or descendants of migrants with ties to Quebec - achieved fame south of the border, particularly in New England, where roughly one million French Canadians had emigrated in search of better fortunes. This book guides readers through the cultural transformation that occurred in the U.S. Francophone communities - where migrants developed distinct identities - and their cultural links to Quebec. As an example, Lavoie notes that while La Bolduc was a best-selling recording artist in Quebec in the 1930s, the press rarely wrote about her, whereas Francophone New England newspapers praised her stardom. In later years, Quebec depicted La Bolduc as a national cultural icon and historical figure with barely a mention of her U.S. popularity - a move that Lavoie argues contributed to erasing the history of the great migrations since she was in fact a transnational bilingual celebrity. "In a way, and even if it's not its central aim, this book can serve as a mirror for French Canadians in Quebec today," Lavoie said. "Like many other settler societies, we tend to talk about migration as other people's problem when in fact French Canadians have been one of the most mobile populations in North America in the last 150 years. Knowing the history of French Canadian mobility is a way to develop more empathy towards people who are experiencing migration now."

Charlotte Biron, professor in literary studies at l'Université du Québec à Montréal, for her book D'Arthur Buies à Gabrielle Roy: Une histoire littéraire du reportage au Québec (1870-1945) (From Arthur Buies to Gabrielle Roy, a literary history of reporting in Quebec (1870-1945)) (Les presses de l'Université de Montréal). Filling a gap in the history of French Canadian literature, Biron spent years delving through newspaper archives from 1870 to 1945 and was captivated by the unique approach to literary journalism in French Canadian newspapers that existed at that time - literary journalism. The style is a cross between journalistic reporting and literary work and the result is descriptively rich articles related to Franco communities across Canada and Northern U.S by writers such as Arthur Buies, Gabrielle Roy, Jules Fournier, and Éva Senécal. "At a time when radio was just getting started and there were few books and no television, these beautifully written newspaper pieces documented personal experiences and stories of an era gone by that transports readers back in time," said Biron, citing railroad travels, boom towns and all things old-fashioned as popular topics of the day. Biron, who was inspired by the period's large number of female literary journalists, explained that one of her most interesting findings was the writers' realization that the world as they knew it was quickly changing and their desire to make time stand still. "This book is a patchwork of treasures by past journalists, capturing fleeting moments," she said, comparing their reporting to podcasts or non-fiction work of today.

About Congress 2025

Billed as a leading conference on the critical conversations of our time, Congress 2025 themed "Reframing togetherness" serves as a platform for the unveiling of thousands of research papers and presentations from social sciences and humanities experts worldwide. With more than 7,000 scholars, graduate students and practitioners expected to participate, the event will challenge attendees to model togetherness by working across differences, questioning hierarchies, and bridging divides in knowledge and experience to tackle the world's most persistent challenges.