UBC Sociology doctoral student Sophie Liu, with doctoral student Kaitlyn Cumming from the Allard School of Law, is spearheading a project that has recently been awarded funding through the PhD CoLab program.
Sophie Liu
The PhD CoLab is a pilot initiative that offers awards and guidance to support PhD students from different disciplines to co-develop new knowledge and/or applications to address complex questions or problems.
The initiative aims to provide new opportunities for PhD students to build competencies and networks in collaborative, inter/transdisciplinary scholarly work, as well as advance collaboration across disciplines.
Their project, “Tackling Online Hate Speech: Legal and Policy Pathways to Finding Justice in Canada,” aims to understand the regulatory and social environments of online platforms, explore the lived experiences of seeking protection and redress through legal channels, and analyze the legal landscape of online hate speech regulation.
Kaitlyn Cumming
The project will receive support from Professors Amanda Cheong and Laura Nelson in the Sociology Department, and Professor Margot Young at the Allard School of Law. The team is also collaborating with Professor Heidi Tworek and Dr. Chris Tenove at the UBC Centre for Study of Democratic Institutions.
The collaboration features a diverse array of approaches and perspectives aimed at comprehensively understand the interplay of complex factors with this issue and how they inter-relate.
The team is one of five teams formed between collaborating PhD students and faculty members that have received funding from the Faculty of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies (G+PS)’s new PhD CoLab pilot program. This particular project has received an award of $30,000.
