Faculty Research Areas

Globalization and Development | Health, Environment and Science | Knowledge, Culture and Power | Social Justice, Policy, Law and Society | Women, Gender and Sexuality

Globalization and Development

Researchers in this area critically examine the consequences of neoliberal globalization, as capital, commodities, people, ideas and meanings flow across borders. Using a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches, our work engages issues of global inequality as reflected in configurations of race, social class, gender, and ethnic relations, environmental projects and campaigns, international commodity chains, food production, the corporate regulatory architecture, violence and armed conflict, state restructuring and 'state failure,’ the proletarianization of third world peasantry and indigenous peoples, national health care policies, migration, displacement, globally circulating urban forms, and other themes. Our work draws from and contributes to a rich tradition of scholarship on global relations, regimes of accumulation, and the effects of neo-liberalism.

Health, Environment, and Science

This area brings together researchers who document the place of health, and environment in the larger picture of well-being for marginalized groups such as women, sexual/gender minorities, colonial subjects, and racial/ethnic minorities, while at the same time critically analyzing the role of medicine and environmental strategies in creating health and citizenship disparities by categorizing, regulating, and disciplining persons. Individual researchers work across the areas of: environmental and rural sociology; medical sociology; anthropology of science and medicine; development studies; neighbourhood studies; cultural studies of medicine; social policy; sport and leisure studies; sexuality studies. They utilize and innovate in quantitative, ethnographic (including experimental ethnographic), textual analytic and historical methods. Current research topics include: housing; lone mothers; mental health and addiction; the role of “psy” professionals in regulatory regimes; the development of “happiness” campaigns; international marketing of pharmaceuticals, including Depo Provera and anti-HIV drugs; environmental interventions (eco tourism, green zones) that impact agricultural regions; inclusion of sexual/gender minorities in sport; urban, post-colonial and immigrant health; secularist efforts to popularize scientific knowledge; childbirth and reproduction; the expansion of sustainable mobilities; atomic culture; the production of nuclear spaces; “wellness” discourse; biomedical research in public health promotion; feminist science and technology studies; community engagements with plants, water, and soil. While many research projects work at the level of transnational government and non-government agencies and programmes, regional specializations include: Canada, Latin America, China, South Asia, United States, Russia/Soviet Union.

Knowledge, Culture, and Power

Faculty in this area combine postcolonial theory, anthropology and sociology of knowledge, history of ideas, cross-cultural comparative, feminist theory, performance studies and philosophy of communication to investigate the systems that are generated through and challenged by shifting forms of knowledge. Focused on the relations of power that organize expert, lay, subaltern, and marginalized knowledge, researchers ask “whose knowledge counts?” Using diverse methods, researchers document the effects of the historical dominance of Western modalities of thought, including Western conceptions of race, the state, the family, public space, and the body. Specific projects include: Islamic politics; disorderly conduct; psychiatry; social construction of sports; social construction of childhood; pharmaceuticals in global contexts; history and memory; racializing neoliberalism; the social construction of sports; ethnographies of wellness; Irish anti-colonial feminist activism; unconventional monuments; clinical spaces; transnational religious movements; the social production of urban space; the social role of place; art worlds; social construction of motherhood; critical pedagogy; urban change and temporality; sensory place-making; urban visual cultures; and displacements within cities.

Social Justice, Policy, Law and Society

Faculty in this area investigate the role of law, policy making and cultural interventions in the organization of social, economic and political life. Research and teaching in this field illuminate, through empirical documentation, how diverse people, communities and institutions interact to foster or deny social justice. Faculty draw on a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to examine a range of themes and issues including colonialism, crime, families, gender, generational relations, health and income inequality, immigration/migration, mental health, human rights, marginalization, political and economic processes, poverty, racialization, sexuality, sport, welfare policy, law and practice, unfree labour and labour trafficking, care work, parental leave policies, controlled migration, and community organzing.

Women, Gender, and Sexuality

Faculty in this area investigate the significance of gender and sexuality as social forces, discursive formations and constellations that interact with other identity categories (race, class, ethnicity, immigration status, citizenship and religion, etceteras) to shape life chances and choices. Faculty members in Anthropological and Sociological disciplines conduct critical scholarship and research from a range of theoretical and methodological approaches including critical ethnography, cultural studies, deconstructionism, feminism, political economy, queer theory and somatechnics. Faculty members and graduate students are engaged in substantive research on gender and sexuality in relation to: childhood; colonialism and postcolonialism; development and globalization; diverse family formations; education; health; law; life story, narrative, and biography; politics of reproduction; social policy; sport; transgendered bodies and issues; war, displacement and violence; wage labour and social reproduction; maternal responsibility; gendered affect; transnational motherhood; transnational love; and activism and emotional labour.

Sociology & Anthropology

Research