Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Social Enterprise

The highlights of my Canada Research Chair (CRC) activities in 2022 began with the bestowal of the President’s Award for Public Engagement Partnerships on Fishing for Success, a social enterprise in Petty Harbour that is my partner in a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (PDG). It was one of many awards this groundbreaking enterprise has received during the past months.

Also related to Fishing for Success, the article, Social Enterprise as a Broker of Identity Resources, was published in Sustainability with my co-author and PDG collaborator Beth DuFault. The article is significant in that it introduces and applies a new multi-level theory of identity based on assemblage theory as developed by Manuel DeLanda. No other theory accounts equally for identity at the levels of individuals, organizations, communities and cultures, and for the complex interactions among them.

On the sustainability front, I co-published the French-language textbook, Marketing (Plus) Durable first edition (roughly translated as “toward more sustainable marketing”) with lead author Pierre Volle, former president of the French Marketing Association (publisher: De Boeck Superieur, Brussels, Belgium).

The book updates material from my earlier book, Sustainable Marketing, with more international examples, a focus on value creation and a framework using the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

The presentation, Consumer Entrepreneurship for Social Innovation, with Lydia Ottlewski and Joonas Rokka, at the annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference (Corvallis, Ore., U.S.) focused on ordinary consumers as social innovators and social entrepreneurs.

Also presented at this conference was art-based research from Brazil with co-authors Luciana Walther, Carlos Eduardo, Felix da Costa and Francisco Alessandri. The three installations titled Self-Portraits in August: Re-Crafting Identity through Intimate Production in a Social Enterprise, Self-Portraits in August: Identities in Clay, and Self-Portraits in August: Identities in Wood focus on the artistic and social value created by and through of the art-based social enterprise, Oficina de Agosto, in the village of Bichinho, Brazil.

In a book of poetry, read and released at the conference, I contributed two Newfoundland poems, "Cranberry Picking at Motion Bay" and "Erratics", and a poem, "Leakage", dealing (in memoriam) with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.