Tomorrow, 618 students from the Faculty of Arts will cross the stage to receive their degrees and distinguished alumni return to campus for special awards. Cindy Blackstock will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws and address Convocation.
Bearing the mace will be Katherine Acheson, Associate Dean, Undergraduate Students, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Reinhold Schuster will sing the national anthem.
Cindy Blackstock gives keynote address at Integrating Knowledges Summit at UWaterloo, October 14, 2016.
Cindy Blackstock is a professor of social work at McGill University. She is member of the Gitxsan First Nation of Northern British Columbia, an advocate on behalf of First Nations children in Canada, a social worker, and a scholar whose activism has had significant impact on the legal and social discourses of Aboriginal youth rights in Canada. She is executive director and founder of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, and is a passionate advocate of research of First Nations communities, and of research collaborations with First Nations community members who understand Indigenous traditions and knowledge as an unrecognized core of much scholarship in Canada. She has been awarded an Atkinson Charitable Foundation's Economic Justice fellowship (2009) and a National Aboriginal Achievement Award (2011). She has also been appointed a Trudeau Mentor as part of the Trudeau Scholarship Program (2012).
Tanya Montebello will receive the James D. Leslie Prize. The prize is given for outstanding performance in studies by distance education.
Danielle Rice will receive the Arts Young Alumni Award.
Gordon Pennycook will receive the Alumni Gold Medal, which is given out for outstanding academic performance in a doctoral program.
Mark Ceolin will receive the Arts Alumni Achievement award.
Anson Ho Wai Lee and Xin Yi Shi will receive the Accounting Alumni Award for Excellence in Accounting, which is given for outstanding academic performance in the Master of Accounting program.
Siobhan Sutherland will receive the Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies award at the Master's level.
Adapted from the Daily Bulletin.