ALIEA Student Award Recipients
Time-to-time, as resources permit, the Alberta Local and International Education Association (ALIEA) provides a grant to support student study abroad and/or student research projects. In recent years, two such awards have been provided.
Amorena Bartlett
University student at MacEwan University in 2017 where she was designated as a Student Ambassador, active as a participant in a project in Chile, a member of the Alberta Deaf Society, and an advocate for deaf students.
Amorena was awarded a travel grant by ALIEA to visit deaf educators in various locations in Ukraine and have an opportunity to use Ukrainian and International Sign Languages. She also participated in a conference on the impact of post-traumatic disorders on people with impaired hearing in order to provide them with psychological help. She heard medical professionals and presented on her experience as a Deaf university student in Canada. At the conference, she also met Rupmani, a UN Ambassador from India focused on accessibility issues. Later she also visited factories that employ deaf workers as well as the nightlife in Kyiv.
Amorena Bartlett (on the right) with Iryna and Rupmani.
Kalyna Somchynsky
Graduate from the University of Alberta who completed a Master’s degree in the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture with a focus on contemporary feminist art in Ukraine. She had extensive experience collecting interviews for the purposes of research and dissemination and received funding from AIEA to research and script a film about Dr. Ehor Gauk. Somchynsky’s duties as Project Coordinator included collaboratively composing the central narrative about Dr. Gauk’s life, gathering supplementary audio and visual material, and leading pre-interviews with prospective interviewees.
Concurrently, she also led an oral history research project entitled Local Narratives: The Lives, Legacies, and Locales of Edmonton’s Ukrainian Canadian Community while employed at the Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre at MacEwan University. The research project culminated in a website that features oral history interviews with members of the Ukrainian Canadian community in Edmonton.
Kalyna Somchynsky