The Canadian Commission for UNESCO (CCUNESCO), the UNESCO Chair on the Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism (UNESCO-PREV) and Project SOMEONE (Social Media Education Every Day) announce the launch of PROFILE, a toolkit to combat racial and social profiling.

Project Someone collaborators and Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) members Owen Chapman (principal investigator), Sandra Chang-Kredl, Annabelle Brault, and Vivek Venkatesh (co-applicants) have received a three-year grant from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) for $204,610 as a research-creation team.

Professor David Morin, co-holder of the UNESCO-PREV Chair, is co-author of this text on deconfinement in Quebec. While the situation appears to be stable in other parts of Quebec, Montreal is among the cities most affected worldwide by the COVID-19 pandemic. In certain boroughs and more importantly in residential and long-term care centres (CHSLDs), the situation far exceeds the government’s capacity to assist certain segments of the population. The COVID-19 pandemic has thus turned into a sectoral humanitarian crisis.

An initiative of the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO), the panel “Peace, Citizenship and Resilience in Conflict and Post-Conflict Contexts” is part of the webinar series “Societies We Want”. The panel will take place on May 28, 2020 from 10:00 to 13:00 via Zoom and will also be broadcasted on Facebook and Youtube.

Organized by the DiploLab in collaboration with the Canadian Embassy in France, the debate “COVID – Is Misinformation a Phantom Threat?” took place on May 14th via videoconference. Marie-Ève Carignan, the UNESCO-PREV Chair’s Head of Media Division and professor at the Université de Sherbrooke, participated in the discussion.

The world is experiencing an unprecedented crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While initiatives and actions of solidarity and dialogue are numerous, messages of hate and intolerance are spreading. Fake news, misinformation and disinformation are being used to target people, communities, countries, and research institutions. To help address these issues, the UNESCO Chair in Prevention of Radicalisation and Violent Extremism (Canada) is launching the free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) ‘From Hate to Hope: Building Understanding and Resilience’.

Youth are more likely to believe in conspiracies, as are Canadians living outside Quebec. Nearly one in ten Canadians believes in conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, according to preliminary findings from a team of researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke. In addition, adherence to conspiracies appears to be related to psychosocial stressors.