$120K grant opens doors for KPU instructor’s research journal

A Kwantlen Polytechnic University English instructor has received a $120,000 grant to fund her humanities research journal.

“I was generally really surprised because this competition hadn’t been open for a few years,” says Lindsey Seatter, who is the journal’s editor-in-chief.

Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH) is an online journal that publishes on media studies, scholarly communication, digital public humanities, textual studies, and digital pedagogy. 

The grant comes from the 2025 Aid to Scholarly Journals competition of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, a federal humanities and social sciences research funding agency.

The idea behind IDEAH came while Seatter was finishing up her PhD at the University of Victoria. She worked with the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, which focuses on projects like the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which holds an annual conference where scholars present their research.

At the conference, Seatter and her team thought it would be great if the research presented was formally collected and published.

She says they searched for an open-access Canadian journal not limited to just tenured work and was free to read and publish — but they couldn’t find one, so IDEAH was born.

“We were at the intersection of ‘Do we just abandon this idea or do we build something to meet this demand?’ So we decided to build it,” Seatter says.

Receiving the grant was a confidence boost and it will help increase readership, engage students, and foster a sense of community, she says.

Seatter adds that they will be able to continue the work they’re doing for the journal with the new financial stability, while also adding team members and publishing more issues.

“We’re really hopeful that we can hire a student research assistant or two from the KPU community to help us do some of this work,” she says. “I think it’s a great opportunity for us to involve some of the wonderful students at our institution.”

Looking ahead, Seatter hopes the funding will help establish a greater presence in the digital world through newsletters and social media. She adds that the goal is to support more conferences and bring more readers, writers, and KPU students on board.

“The people who come through my classroom are so thoughtful, smart, and creative,” she says. “The thought that I can have them jump on this project with me is so exciting, and I’m really hopeful for the kind of people that we can include on IDEAH’s team.”

She says that the message she wants people to take away from the journal is that they’re welcome here.

“The whole purpose of IDEAH was to get this research out to readers, so the more people who want to come in, whether it’s for one particular article … or they know a scholar’s work and want to do a deep dive, or someone just wants to explore an issue at the top level — all of those readers are people we want,” Seatter says.

Past issues of the journal are available on PubPub. The June issue will be published on Érudit.