January 2024: Prentice Institute News

The Prentice Institute collaborates with researchers in Canada and elsewhere to address some of the most difficult challenges of the next generation and beyond.

New Faces at the Prentice Institute

Melissa Wilke

Melissa Wilk recently joined the Prentice Institute as a Research Associate, and provides support on a range of projects. She has experience in a range of government settings, including at Environment and Climate Change Canada and Natural Resources Canada, as well as in academic settings as a term lecturer and teaching assistant for the Augustana Cuba Study Abroad Program.

She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Global and Development Studies at the University of Alberta Augustana Campus in 2019. She then completed a Master of Arts in International Affairs at Carleton University in 2022. She is passionate about sustainable development, food security, and international relations.

Sydney Rolfe

Sydney Rolfe is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Political Science and minoring in History. Sydney will be working part-time as a research assistant supervised by Dr. Lars Hallstrom.

Sandi Davy



Sandi had been working as an Administration Assistant for over 20 years of her life. She worked in both the private and public sectors with various expectations and roles. She appreciates new challenges and likes to think of herself as a people person who enjoys working with her colleagues and the public. When looking for a new position, she liked the research that the Prentice Institute was conducting and had to be a part of it.

Research Assistant Amy Cran presented a paper co-authored with supervisor Dr. Patrick Wilson (Anthropology) and SAGE Clan Patrol Founder, Mark Brave Rock, at the joint American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) Annual Meeting. Their paper, "Walking with SAGE Clan Patrol: Practicing Empathy in the Indigenous Urban Landscape" was based in part on the ethnographic fieldwork that is the basis of Amy's recently completed Honours Thesis, and was part of the Global Urban Indigeneities Executive Oral Presentation Session on Friday, November 17. It explored how the work of this grassroots, Blackfoot-led outreach organization can, through asserting a connection to patrollers' traditional territory, be read as a resistance to the enduring settler colonial city and their approach, premised on values of kinship, as articulating alternative conceptions of community and ultimately, a pathway towards reconciliation.

In mid-November, Research Assistant Sydney Whiting travelled to Vancouver to attend the Canada-Japan Policy Design Workshop as a member of the Young Diplomats of Canada delegation. The workshop brought together 5 Canadians and 5 Japanese students to discuss peace and security through the G7 Hiroshima Summit Legacy Project. Policy proposals focused on threats to security posed by climate change, human displacement, diversity and equity in policymaking, Indigenous sovereignty, and gender-based violence. As the Canadian Peace/Security representative to the Youth 7 Summit in Tokyo earlier this year, this workshop was an opportunity for Sydney to expand on her youth-based policy work. She is grateful to the Prentice Institute for the financial support to attend this workshop. 

Congratulations to Associate Director, Dr. Andrea Cuéllar and Perry Stein with the City of Lethbridge on receiving a University of Lethbridge SSHRC Explore Award for the project “Food security: An urban planning and community of practice approach.”

This project will explore the relationship between food security and land use as a dimension of the City of Lethbridge (COL) Land Use Bylaw (LUB) renewal project. While having broader community-wide implications, the project will address the problem through the perspective of postsecondary students. The project will be executed as part of a collaboration between the Prentice Institute (PI) at the University of Lethbridge (UL), the Lethbridge College (LC), and the COL, the main component of which, is a Policy Innovation Lab (PIL) in May 2024. The PIL is an intensive work-integrated learning (WIL) program where students will work towards, a. a preliminary characterization of the nature and scope of food insecurity in the student population; b. an examination of policy instruments available to municipalities as they relate to food security; and c. the development of a research report that outlines the ways in which the LUB renewal project can address food insecurity through land use regulations. By focusing on structural factors driving food (in)security in urban contexts and through the application of an equity framework to the examination of land use, this project contributes an alternative to the more common focus on “alleviation” mechanisms—it also resonates with a framework for food security that targets the social body instead of individuals, and in doing so acknowledges the uneven impact of land regulations within an urban population. 

On November 30, 2023, Prentice Institute Director, Dr. Lars Hallstrom presented as a member of the Labour Panel at the Economics Society of Northern Alberta 2024 Economic Outlook Conference in Edmonton. His presentation was entitled: “Automation and business readiness for technological and demographic change in rural Alberta.”