Nicholas Dubé

As the province of New Brunswick was unable to sustain any population growth over the last decade, the provincial government established the Population Growth Secretariat in 2007 to take action to regenerate growth in the province's population. One way in which the province intends to do this is through “increased immigration, together with activities supporting settlement services and multiculturalism...” Thus, given the foreseeable increase in the importance of immigrants in the province, I designed a project to explore their experiences with the health care system through interviews and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the system before these become bigger issues. Following the completion of my research, I will work to bring increased attention to these issues and to address specific problems with various decision-makers.

I decided to research newcomer health issues because so little has been done on this particular topic in New Brunswick – even compared to Nova Scotia. This lack became especially apparent to me last year while studying in Washington, DC with the support of the Killam Fellowships Program. Even states similar to New Brunswick in their geography and demographics have well-established programs dealing with "minority health".

Although I am completing a General B.A. with minors in German, biology and classics, my main interest lies in newcomer health issues and I was fortunate to be able to undertake this project under the supervision of Dr. Judith Doyle of the Sociology Department. Many thanks to the Goodridge Fellowship for supporting this project!

Children, Television, and Identity
Haley Roback

Much research has been done on children and television, usually concerned with violence and dominated by American and British experience. At the same time, research on nationalism often mentions the importance of children but there are few studies examining how children learn or make sense of nationalism or national identities. There are no studies that look at television, children and nationalism. My study, supervised by Dr. Judith Doyle, will fill that gap, in particular by looking at Kids' CBC, a children's television program, and how it relates to Canadian nationalism. By conducting focus groups in the Sackville area, I intend to explore how Canada is constructed and how Canadian nationalism is promoted, specifically through Kids' CBC.