News

On March 6, 2020, Arts hosted its Three Minute Thesis (3MT) faculty-level heat and advanced Psychology PhD candidate Martin Turpin (first place winner and People's Choice winner) and Psychology master's student Sarena (second place winner) to the university-wide finals. While that university-wide final is now being held virtually, this doesn't mean our Arts graduate student competitors don't need your support. 

Janet Jones, a PhD candidate in Philosophy has been recognized for her wonderful dissertation work titled “It Probably Won’t Help Anyway: How Stigma Hurts Health Care Access for Persons with an Addiction” and is the recipient of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her work.

Serena McDiarmid, a PhD candidate in Psychology, has been recognized with the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her incredible research proposal titled “Supporting second language acquisition of Canada’s child refugees: a longitudinal study of risk and protective factors for language learning success.”

She is the type of student who is not easily forgotten, wrote her nominator. The positive impact that new graduate Kiera McMaster leaves on her peers and wider community was recently recognized when she won the Faculty of Arts Award for Excellence in Service.

Public Issues Anthropology MA graduate Kate Elliott has made her mark at the University in a number of impressive ways, especially for her activism around period poverty and period education. Her research and advocacy centres on the health of women experiencing homelessness, and specifically how structural violence impacts their lived experiences. 

When he was an undergraduate in Winnipeg, Harrison Oakes (MA ’16, PhD '20) witnessed the difficulty of promoting change for marginalized groups when he sat in on hearings for Manitoba’s proposed Bill 18. People argued that they couldn’t see how the legislation for anti-bullying to protect LGBTQ+ youth applied to all kids. Seven years later, Oakes’ doctoral research helps to answer that question.

It's a long and often winding road to take doctoral studies to the finish line. From seminars, to exams, to TAs, RAs or course teaching, to research, research, research, and to the final thesis defense -- many of which were remotely conducted in this time of COVID. It's a huge accomplishment and the Faculty of Arts is so proud of our newest cohort of Doctors of Philosophy.

The Faculty of Arts proudly celebrates all graduates (more than 1,400 of them!) who would have been walking across the stage to receive their diploma's this week. As part of our virtual spring 2020 convocation celebrations, we warmly congratulate the distinguished undergraduates recieving top performance awards. 

In our work and interactions, we need to be conscious of and proactively challenge white privilege and colonial structures. We need to continuously strive to create an equal, fair and welcoming learning environment for everyone.

Spring term is one of our favourite times of year! While we can't be together on campus this year, we found some background photos in our archives to bring a little UWaterloo Arts home with us. (After all, who isn't spending more time online thanks to online classes, meetings and social gatherings?)