Our Objectives

Knowledge mobilization and transfer

The objectives of our present project are to build capacity for knowledge mobilization and transfer of the existing SOMEONE materials on a national and international scale via the following four mechanisms:

  • To co-develop, implement and evaluate multimedia materials and workshops to foster resilience against the ill effects of hate speech and radicalization that leads to violent extremism with social and community organizations that work with disadvantaged communities, at-risk youth, minority communities, and aging populations, both within Canada and abroad.
  • To implement curricular strategies developed for the SOMEONE initiative within specific elementary, secondary, and post-secondary scholastic systems in Canada, and to begin exploring options of working with international educational counterparts in Europe and the Middle East to benefit from knowledge exchange opportunities.
  • To work with national and international partners in arts, culture and media – including radio, television, newspapers and web-based services – to create public engagement exercises to enable the broader public to contribute to creating alternative narratives to messages of hate and radicalization.
  • To engage with expert partners in software development with the objective of creating a framework for an online database which provides rigorous, evidence-based linguistic analysis of the patterns of hate speech which are proliferated across the open online internet.