Contact Info:

Department of Political Science

Acadia University

Phone: 585-1451

Fax: 585-1070

Email: cynthia.alexander@acadiau.ca

 

 

Cynthia Alexander is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Acadia University. She has been investigating the adoption of computer technologies by Canadian governments since the mid-eighties when she received her Ph.D. at Queen’s University in Kingston. In her assessment of the evolution of e-government and e-governance in Canada, she has been paying particular attention to whether and how new media technologies can serve to meet the policy needs and interests of marginalized communities of interests.

 

She has been working in partnership with several First Nations communities in Canada to develop a culturally-relevant First Nations ICT strategic model. Alexander continues to investigate how network technologies can support multi-stakeholder consensus-building initiatives, a field of interest drawn from her first book, A Stake in the Future: Redefining the Canadian Mineral Industry (UBC, 1997), co-authored with Dr. Mary Louise McAllister. Alexander co-edited Digital Democracy: Policy and Politics in the Wired World with Dr. Leslie Pal (Oxford, 1998). She is completing two books, The Digital Leviathan and The Culture Quotient: Administrative and Policy Processes in the Government of Nunavut, co-authored with Marcel Fortier.

She is a co-investigator on a small research team, funded by the SSHRC INE Research Alliance, that is assessing whether and how 'youth at risk' in Nova Scotia and Nunavut are being given opportunities to gain the new literacy skills they need to participate in the Knowledge-based Economy and Society. In March 2004, she received a SSHRC Northern Research Grant to fund the Nunavut Policy Symposium.