Two sociology professors awarded SSHRC Small Research Grants

We are thrilled to share the news that two Professors of Sociology - Dr. Lindsey Freeman & Dr. Travers were recently awarded SSHRC Small Research Grants for their researches.

Dr. Lindsey Freeman's new research project is titled "Fieldwork." The grant will enable her to go to the Women's World Cup this summer in Australia and New Zealand to do research for a book that she is writing about soccer, queer joy, and how hard it is to care about things.

Dr. Travers' new research seeks to track the impact of increasingly powerful anti-trans social movements on trans youth and to discover strategies trans youth are employing to survive and thrive in the face of some challenges.

Transgender youth in the United States and Canada have emerged as a visible population since the early 2000s, because of social movements composed of trans people of all ages, parents of trans kids, and healthcare practitioners. While the visibility of trans youth reflects the success of this social movement, efforts to push trans people back into the margins gained momentum with the election of President Trump in 2016. Since that time, religious and secular political actors have succeeded in stoking a moral panic around trans kids. 

The project includes two main research activities. First, U.S. media addressing transgender people/issues from 2017 to the present will be collected and analyzed. Second, open-ended, narrative interviews with a diverse sample of 50 trans youth from Canada and the USA will be conducted to learn what trans youth are hearing about themselves from others, media included, its impact on them, and how they are responding to it. This study will provide data to enable Dr. Travers to produce a follow up book to their critically acclaimed 2018 publication, The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution.