Research

This is a general overview of faculty research interests.

Nahla Abdo

Ph.D. (Toronto)

General interest in political economic studies, with an emphasis on the Middle East. Gender, race, and class; women’s studies in developing and underdeveloped countries; nationalism and nation state. Currently working on a research project sponsored by IDRC, entitled “Women, development and democratization in Palestine.

Claudio Aporta

Ph.D. (Alberta)

General interest in Inuit culture, with an emphasis on Inuit knowledge of the territory (land and sea ice) and Inuit techniques of travelling and wayfinding; particular interest in applying Geographic Information Systems and other new cartographic tools to record and represent oral knowledge; general interest in human relations with dynamic environments, anthropology of technology, and applied anthropology.

Hugh Armstrong

Ph.D. (Montreal)

The political economy of health and health care; women and work; family and household structures; the organization of work; unions and public policy; labour market policy; training and education policy.

Valda Blundell (Professor Emeritus)

Ph.D. (Wisconsin)

Cultural studies and semiotics, with particular interests in aesthetic forms by and/or about Canada’s aboriginal peoples, and state tourism policy and representations of aboriginal cultures.

Tullio Caputo

Ph.D. (Michigan State)

Criminology, juvenile justice, the sociology of law, youth violence and youth gangs,  policing, crime prevention; youth engagement and participation; sustainable community initiatives; community development and capacity building.

Jacques Chevalier

Ph.D. (Edinburgh)

Theoretical and methodological issues in semiotics and the anthropology of underdevelopment. Current research focuses on peasant economics and sustainable development in Latin America (Mexican tropics). Continued study of semiotic theory and its application to biblical mythology.

Wallace Clement

Ph.D. (Carleton), FRSC

Political economy, Canadian society, social stratification, the labour process; case studies of class formation and the labour process in mining and fishing; national survey of class structure and gender in Canada, with a comparison to Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the United States; class and the state in Canada, Australia, Sweden, Japan, West Germany, and the United Kingdom; comparative labour market policies and practices.

David Cray

Ph.D. (Wisconsin)

Strategic decision making; computer-based aids to negotiation and bargaining; international business; organizational symbolism; language in business.

Bruce Curtis

Ph.D. (Toronto)

State formation, moral regulation and knowledge forms; development of the “social and moral sciences”; theories of governance; identifying practices and powers of state; the administration of subjectivity; comparative educational development. Area interest: the Canadas and the British Empire c. 1780-1900.

Louise de la Gorgendière

Ph.D. (Cambridge, UK)

Social development consultant; contested priorities, people villages and the state in Ghana; global policy and practice focus for social development and OECD; social policy in West and Southern Africa and civil societies; HIV/AIDS research.

John de Vries (Professor Emeritus)

Ph.D. (Wisconsin)

Comparative, quantitative analysis of factors affecting the survival or decline of linguistic minorities in Canada and western Europe; demographic analyses (particularly estimation techniques) of ethnolinguistic minorities. Current emphasis is on minorities in Canada and Finland. Sociological aspects of immersion education in Canada, Finland and Spain.

Andrea Doucet

Ph.D. (Cambridge)

Gender and domestic life; qualitative methodology; feminist methodologies and epistemologies; feminist theories; masculinities; gender and development.

Aaron Doyle

Ph.D. (British Columbia)

Criminology; risk, insurance and governance; relations between media, culture and criminal justice; social influences of media technology; social movements, protest and the news media; relations between journalism and academia, particularly in the social sciences.

Margaret Foddy

Ph.D. (British Columbia)

Social dilemmas; status in small groups; self concept; blame and domestic violence.

Dennis Forcese

Ph.D. (Washington, St. Louis)

Policing: community policing; police unionism; police work morale; differential police response systems; public opinion of policing.

Neil Gerlach

Ph.D. (Carleton)

The intersection of social governance and biotechnologies, DNA-based surveillance strategies, expertise and social regulation, social science fiction, organization studies, diffusion of corporate management discourses.

Brian Given

Ph.D. (Alberta)

Immigrant and refugee settlement and adaptation; cultural survival; belief systems; ritual and meditation systems; Tibetan culture and religion; Buddhism; new religions in Canada; ethnohistory; culture and technology; firearms and society; computers and society; the Internet.

Peter Gose

Ph.D. (London School of Economics)

Colonialism, racism, hegemony, ritual, symbolic theory, economic anthropology, Latin America, Andes. Currently concluding a study of Andean and Catholic forms of ancestor worship as arenas of inter-ethnic alliance and racial exclusion in colonial Peru. Research in progress on inquisitorial articulations of racism in early modern Spain and its colonies.

Alan Hunt

Ph.D. (Leeds)

Sociology of governance; moral regulation; regulation of consumption; governance of the self; historical sociology; regulation of poverty and idleness; social purity movements; sociology of law; popular legal culture; Foucault; Marxism.

Jared Keil

Ph.D. (Harvard)

Continuing research on data gathered during 2 1/2 years of fieldwork (1971-73, 1982-83) in the North Solomons Province, Papua New Guinea. Nationalism, ethnicity, and the right to self-determination in Bougainville’s occupation and blockade by the PNG Defence Forces, 1989-present. Areas of interest in social anthropology include: kinship, gender, and social organization; feminist analyses; development and underdevelopment; Melanesia.

Florence Kellner (Professor Emeritus)

Ph.D. (Rutgers)

Epidemiology of substance use and abuse, with a special focus on alcohol; identification of Canadian trends in the use of psychoactive drugs; phenomenology of addiction; and concepts of health and illness.

Katharine Kelly

Ph.D. (Toronto)

Canadian society; violence against women; youth in conflict with the law. Current research projects on sexual assault, women and violence.

Charles Laughlin (Professor Emeritus)

Ph.D. (Oregon)

Symbolic systems; pre- and perinatal culture; religion; neuroanthropology; transpersonal anthropology; Navajo culture.

Zhiqiu Lin

Ph.D. (Calgary)

Sociology of law; policing and crime in Canadian history; research methodology; economic reform, corruption, and legal development in contemporary China.

Rianne Mahon

Ph.D. (Toronto)

State theory, including welfare states, the nation-state and modern nationalism; restructuring of labour markets and the role of unions; comparative analysis of trade unions, with particular emphasis on Canada and Sweden; welfare state restructuring and the place of day care (and eventually elder care) from a comparative perspective, with particular emphasis on Canada and Sweden; political economy.

Karen March

Ph.D. (McMaster)

Adoption; kinship, marriage and family; motherhood; qualitative research methods; field research.

Heather Jon Maroney

Ph.D. (McMaster)

Gender politics and women’s movements in Québec; Canadian women’s movements; feminist theory; feminism and political economy.

Michèle Martin

Ph.D. (Toronto)

The conditions – political, economic, social, gender and race-related – within which diverse types of culture emerged from various technologies of communication, going from the written press to telecommunications; the way the information and knowledge diffused by these technologies influence the construction of popular memory.

Maeve McMahon

Ph.D. (Toronto)

Sociology of deviance and control; criminal justice politics and reform; imprisonment and alternatives; policy accountability; women and prisons.

Amina Mire

Ph.D. (Toronto)

Anti-racist/anticolonial research; women and health; feminist sociology and political thought; critical race theory; sociology of knowledge; bioethics and racialization and biomedicalization of women’s bodies and skins; interdisciplinary analysis and research and methods to critically examine the production of scientific knowledge for destructive and oppressive economic ends such as skin-whitening biotechnology and militarism.

Michael Mopas

Ph.D. (Toronto)

Criinology: socio-legal studies; science and technology studies; policing; surveilance; science, technology and criminal justice; crime, media and popular culture; cyber-crime and cyber-governance.

Pat O’Malley

Ph.D. (London School of Economics and Political Science)

Risk in government, society and economy; the politics and practices of criminal justice; illicit and licit drug consumption and relevant governmental strategies; historical criminology; sociology of law; neo-liberalism and post social government; the politics of pleasure; governmentality.

Augustine Park

Ph.D. (York University)

Peacebuilding; post-conflict transitional justice; war criminology; resotrage justice; childhood.

Donna Patrick

Ph.D. (Toronto)

Language and culture; First Nations and the Canadian Arctic; sociology of language;

language and nationhood; minority languages and multilingualism; language rights and

policy; language and political economy, ideology, and globalization; sociolinguistics and the intersection of language with culture, politics, race, class, gender, and ethnicity; language practices in institutional settings.

George Pollard

PhD. (Concordia)

Pre-communication and communication as distinct aspects of interactional activity, including social and cultural use of the senses, space, eyes and face, architecture, gestures, movement; crowds, including riots, ecstatic encounters, and faith healing; rumours, gossip and urban legends; media as work and media professionalism.

Ian Prattis

Ph.D. (British Columbia)

Paradigm shift in science; epistemology. Symbols and world peace; the nature of change, examination of shifts in attitude, balance, creativity, and attunement to produce a new order in education, business, and politics; anthropological poetics. Environmental and futurology studies.

Steven Prus

Ph.D. (Simon Fraser)

Social research methodology and statistics; social stratification/inequality; sociology of aging; and sociology of medicine.

Jen Pylypa

Ph.D. (Arizona)

medical anthropology; global health; ethnomedicine; infectious disease; health and well-being of women and children; immigrant health; global migration of health workers; single parenthood and transnational adoption; pharmaceutical use and self-medication; Southeast Asia, especially Laos and Thailand; immigrants in North America; Canada

Paul Reed

Ph.D. (Toronto)

Self-interest, altruism, and the social logic of cooperation; individuals, institutions, and the social contract in Canada; social infrastructure and the foundations of community; the social ethos and civic reasoning; economics of time; Canadians and their public institutions; the social dynamics of contributory behaviour; the grants economy in Canada; understanding the voluntary sector; historical patterns in the administration of justice in Canada.

George Rigakos

Ph.D. (York)

The political economy of public and private policing; Policing as a general historical project of social regulation; The increasing role of Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) in local governance and security; Nightclubs as spectacles of risk, insecurity and consumption in late capitalism; A six-year longitudinal study of a crime prevention through social development (CPTSD) project in Toronto’s Jane-Finch area; Marxism; The concept of ‘risk’ and critical realist philosophy.

Blair Rutherford

Ph.D. (McGill)

Politics and possibilities of international development, civil society in sub-Saharan Africa; farm workers in Zimbabwe; anthropology of power, state and globalization; applied anthropology; colonialism and post-colonialism; political economy, social history and Foucauldian analyses of labour migration and the land question in southern Africa; critical theory.

John Shepherd

D.Phil. (York, U.K.), FRSC

The sociology and aesthetics of music; cultural studies; popular music studies; the sociology of music education; and the discipline of musicology.

Janet Siltanen

Ph.D. (Cambridge)

General interest in the processes reproducing and transforming social inequality and a particular concern with the structuring of employment-household-state relations. Current work includes an analysis of gender and the reconstruction of social and political theory.

Frances Slaney

Ph.D. (Laval)

Tarahumara ritual duplication and its articulation of conflicting – yet inderdependent – Tarahumara and mestizo viewpoints on colonial history, ethnicity, personhood, landscape and death; the cultural politics of museumizing Catholic relics and reliquaries; historical and archival research into the history of Canada’s anthropology of art through the figure of Marius C. Barbeau and his ties to British, French and American “schools” of anthropological thought. Fields of interest include: ritual, symbolism, nationalism, mesoamerican ethnography, history of anthropological theory, the cultural politics of museums, material culture, and anthropology of art.

Daiva Stasiulis

Ph.D. (Toronto)

Feminist analyses of minority women, work, racism, and citizenship; history of racism in Canada; Canadian state discourses and practices in multiculturalism, immigration, and anti-racist policies; comparative investigations of the political economy of racism in settler societies; social movements; political theory.

Michel Vallée

M.Sc. Criminology (Montreal)

Children and youth in conflict with the law, youth justice and crime prevention with a focus on social development. Law enforcement and police-community partnerships. Criminal justice policy development and implementation with emphasis on the role of governments. Socio-legal policy, research and evaluation work related to children and youth. International comparative analysis with particular attention to francophone speaking countries.

Rosemary Warskett

Ph.D. (Carleton)

Traditional and contemporary theories of the state and law; theory and practice of labour relations, women and unions, pay and employment equity.

The following research centres are administrated through the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

Centre for Initiatives on Children, Youth and Community (CICYC)

C763 Loeb Building

T. Caputo, K. Kelly

(613) 520-2600 Ext. 2624

Centre for Applied Social Research (CASR)

D795 Loeb Building

P. Reed, J. de Vries, S. Prus

(613) 520-2600 Ext. 8217

Charles Duncombe Education Research Centre

601 Dunton Tower

B. Curtis

(613) 520-2600 Ext. 2596

Research Resource Division for Refugees (RRDR)

2126 Dunton Tower

Director, Adnan Turegun

(613) 520-2717