McMaster University’s Faculty of Social Sciences is pleased to announce the launch of its new strategic plan. The document results from wide-ranging consultations with key stakeholders including faculty members, leadership, staff and students.

In the context of the Faculty’s continuing pursuit of excellence in education, research and service, the plan focuses on the following five cross-cutting core priorities:

• Interdisciplinarity – Interdisciplinarity encourages collaboration and exchange among faculty, students and staff across disciplines and fields of study. It fosters cross-fertilization of ideas and novel insights that enhance our ability to address multi-faceted societal challenges.
• Experiential Learning and Career Guidance – Experiential learning and career guidance ensure that students “learn-by-doing” through curricular and extra-curricular activities in simulated or real work contexts ensuring that they understand career options and how best to pursue them.

• Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Indigenous Strategies (EDIIS) – EDIIS aims to create a sense of belonging among all by increasing the representation of members of equity-deserving groups and Indigenous persons among faculty, staff, and students; increasing understanding of bias, systemic racism, and related phenomena experienced by members of equity-deserving groups while attending to strategic objectives distinct to Indigenous persons; and reducing bias and systemic racism within the Faculty, the University, and society.
• Engagement with Local and Global Communities – Engagement that spans communities from the local to the global to foster stronger relationships, mutually beneficial partnerships, international experiences, and deeper understanding of global dimensions of local, national, and global challenges.
• Operational Excellence – Operational excellence calls for the responsive, effective, and efficient delivery of professional and administrative support services to advance the overall mission of the Faculty.

“We are grateful for the intentional and thoughtful feedback received from stakeholders over many months,” says Social Sciences Dean Jeremiah Hurley. “This strategic plan not only identifies the faculty’s key priorities for the coming four years but outlines our plans to achieve our targets and shares our definitions of success. Critically, this plan will also encourage accountability.”

You may access the plan here. You may also request a hard copy.