Congratulations to Professor Neda Maghbouleh who was recently awarded with one of this year's Province of Ontario's Early Researcher Awards. The goal of the Early Researcher Award is to help early career researchers build their research teams. Funded by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Sciences, the Early Researcher Award provides five years of research funding to exceptional scholars whose research is poised to make an impact on Ontario's social, cultural and/or economic future. Professor Maghbouleh received the grant for her work studying the experiences of Syrian newcomers in Toronto. This research is part of a larger project that Maghbouleh is pursuing with Professors Ito Peng and Melissa Milkie.
Professor Maghbouleh's Early Researcher Award project, titled "Settlement, Integration and Stress: A 5-Yr Longitudinal Study of Syrian Newcomer Mothers and Teens in the GTA," builds on work that Maghbouleh began with Peng and Milkie and financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This project focuses on how Syrian refugee mothers and teens experience family and integration-related stress in the three to five years following settlement. Because two-thirds of Canada’s Wave 1 of Syrian refugee newcomers are children under the age of 18 or the adults caring for them, it is reasonable to expect that they face the enormous tasks involved in acclimatizing themselves to a different culture and environment at the same time as they are dealing with the strains typically associated with childhood, adolescence and parenthood. This research will offer tangible strategies for Ontario's service providers, sponsor groups, and everyday citizens to more efficiently and effectively support newcomers.
Professor Maghbouleh is an Assistant Professor of Sociology with teaching responsibilities at the University of Toronto, Mississauga campus. Her research program addresses the social integration of immigrants from the Middle East who settle in North America. This project follows the completion of her first major research project, on Iranians and race in the U.S., and the publication of her book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race.