News

Steve Romanin, MA student in Critical Sociology Program, will present his thesis defence on May 16, 2013 at 10:00 am in Welch Hall, Room 147. The title of his thesis is "M(e)a(t)sculinity: Investigating Veg(etari)an Men's Understandings of Masculinity". 

 

Examining Committee Members are: Chair:TBD; Dr. Michael Kehler, University of Western Ontario, External Examiner; Dr. John Sorenson, Supervisor; Dr. Lauren Corman and Dr. Mary-Beth Raddon, Committee Members.

 

All are welcome to attend.

 

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2012

Sarah Rizzo on the successful completion of her MRP "The Incarceration of Women in Federal Prisons in Canada: Creating Choices (1990) and Beyond"

 

Christopher Walsh on the successful completion of his MRP "After Work: The Informal Regulation of Disenfranchised Labour"
 

Navdeep (Neeva) Sandhu on the successful completion of her MRP "Petals in the Wind: A Critical Examination of Indian Social Policies Addressing Gender Inequality"

 

Kaley Williams on the sucessful completion of her MRP "Going Back to 'Nothing Works': A Critical Discourse Analysis of Youth Offender Rehabilitation in the Niagara Region"

Krystan Jones on the successful completion of her MRP "Representing Downtown Vancouver's Eastside: Degeneracy, Gentrification and the 'Woodwards's Squat'"

2011
Kristen Westcott on the successful completion of her MRP "Hegemonic Discourses of Gender in the Curriculum of Higher Education"

Afsana Tabibi on the successful completion of her MRP "Afghan Women Speak Back: Agency and Colonial Representations in the Contemporary West"

2010
Matt Lemaire on the successful completion of his MRP "In the Law We Trust? The Successes, Failures, and Perceptions of the 1983 Canadian Sexual Assault Reforms"

 

Sociology Speaker's Series

"Individualization and the Environment: Expanding the Debate"

Dr. Dennis Soron
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
2:00p.m. - 4:00 p.m. AS 427
 

 

Speaker's Series presentation on January 16, 2013, at 11:00 a.m., AS 427. Dr. Lauren Corman will be presenting "The Ventriloquist's Burden? Animals, Vice and Politics"

Speakers Series presentation on November 15th at 10a.m. in room AS 427. Sara Cumming’s topic is “Workfare! Work Where? A critique of the Programs and Policies Designed by Ontario Works to get Welfare Recipients ‘Job Ready’”.

Brock Socialist Club

On Friday, Nov. 23, the Department of Sociology and the Brock Socialist Club are co-sponsoring a panel discussion on the theme "Crisis, Austerity and Resistance." The panelists will be Jonah Butovsky, Josh Dumont and Murray Smith, all from the Department of Sociology. The event will be held in Room 216, Academic South and will run from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. All are welcome. 

 

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 Political Science Speaker's Series
The labour studies political economy speaker series has its second event today.  We are proud to present Stephen McBride, who will be giving a talk, "labour in a cold climate," today, October 9, 2012 at 3:30pm in PL 600.  We hope to see you there.

Stephen McBride is the Canada Research Chair in Public Policy and Globalization and professor of political science at McMaster University. He is the author of Not Working: State, Unemployment and Neo-conservatism in Canada (1992) which won the 1994 Smiley prize, and Paradigm Shift: Globalization and the Canadian State (2001; 2nd edition 2005). He is the co-author of Dismantling a Nation: Canada and the New World Order (1993; 2nd edition 1997) and of Private Affluence, Public Austerity: Economic Crisis and Democratic Malaise in Canada (2011). His current research is focussed on the impact of globalization on the state, and the political economy of labour and the welfare state.

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The first talk in the labour studies / political economy speaker series will be this Thursday (the 27th), at 2:30pm in the Sankey Chambers. Justin Paulson, from Carleton University, will deliver a talk entitled "Why Do Movements Decline?" All are welcome to attend - light refreshments will be served. Please consider attending, and feel free to distribute this reminder widely.

Justin Paulson teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. His research and teaching focus on questions of Marxian critical theory, social movements, and political economy. This talk stems from his ongoing project surrounding the relationship between radical imagination and social movement development and strategy. He also is also researching neoliberal urbanism in Canada and the uneven reification of capital. Justin has written for such journals as The Socialist Register, Affinities, and Cultural Logic, and is on the editorial boards of Studies in Political Economy, Mediations, and Red Quill Books.

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The second seminar in the Society for Philosophy & Culture and
Institute on Globalization & the Human Condition

2012/13 "Crossing Borders" speaker series is coming up on Friday October the 5th at
McMaster University.

"Haunting Sovereignties: the Border as Enforcement Archipelago" by Alison Mountz (Wilfrid Laurier University, Geography and Environmental Sciences)
Responses by Jane Helleiner (Brock University, Sociology) and Peter
Nyers (McMaster University, Political Science)

Friday 5th October, 3:30pm in Chester New Hall (CNH) 607B. McMaster University

In order to map what many scholars have called the "securitisation of migration," it is essential to begin with the border. Once conceived of as a line drawn by cartographers, the border has undergone dramatic spatial and conceptual transformations. It is transnational, fragmented, biometric, intimate, privatised, contracted out, policed onshore and offshore, haunting. Local enforcement officials internal to sovereign territory take up the work of border enforcement and federal authorities travel abroad to police borders in foreign territory. These vertiginous spatial logics repeat themselves time and again.

This talk maps these largely hidden geographies to show how sovereign powers haunt migrants through the displacement and relocation of the border. States increasingly invest in intimacies of daily life,
exercising biopolitical power through the simultaneous integration of information about the body and isolation of those very bodies through remote practices of interception and detention. The border is reconstituted through this fragmentation.

Sovereign power at once fails and is reconfigured through the performative work of enforcement that plays on what is hypervisible and what is left unseen. Through the blurring of on and offshore, inside and out, intimate knowledge and publicly securitised agendas, haunting sovereignties extend outward like tentacles, moving the border to intercepted bodies, carrying out detention in ambiguous places between states through "third parties." This haunting continues
even as those forces made invisible continually reappear, their absence ever-present.
 

Past Events
John Sorenson will be presenting a talk, as part of the Labour Studies Political Economy Speakers Series, on the Political Economy of Animal Rights. The talk is from 2:30 to 4:00, this Tuesday (March 20th), in the Sankey Chambers. Light refreshments will be served.

John Sorenson is professor and chair of sociology at Brock University, where he teaches courses on critical animal studies, racism, and globalization. He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on various ways of representing animals. His previous books, stemming from research on war, nationalism, and refugees, include Culture of Prejudice: Arguments in Critical Social Science; Ghosts and Shadows: Construction of Identity and Community in an African Diaspora; Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa; Disaster and Development in the Horn of Africa; and African Refugees. His most recent books, centering on animals, are Ape and About Canada – Animal Rights.
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What: "Interrogating Olympic effects: Policing, security, and low-income young people in Vancouver" - A Talk by Dr. Jacqueline Kennelly (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University)

When: Tuesday, March 13, 10 am - 12 pm, 600F Plaza, Brock University

RSVP: As breakfast and brunch items will be provided, we'd greatly appreciate your RSVP. Please write to Lauren at lcorman@brocku.ca to confirm. Thank you!

The Department of Sociology is proud to host its 2011-2012 speakers series. This is our fifth event of the current series, and it represents the work of a notable external scholar. This is the larger keynote event for the series.

Dr. Kennelly's talk is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Child and Youth Studies. The event is also proudly presented as part of the CHYS Colloquium Series.

The event is free. Snacks and beverages will be provided. All are welcome! Please forward this announcement to others!
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I'm writing to remind you all of the very important event that the
Brock Socialist Club and the Centre for Labour Studies have organized
for Friday, March 9 in the Sankey Chamber (Mackenizie Chown) starting
at 4:00 p.m.

The event is entitled "Beyond Occupy: Class-Struggle Unionism and the
Fight to Change the World" and is being co-sponsored by the Centre for
Labour Studies, CUPE 4207, BUFA and the Department of Sociology. Our
main speakers will be Professor Bryan Palmer of Trent University,
Canada's premier Marxist labour historian, and Jack Heyman, one of
the most remarkable American labour union militants of his generation.

Last year, Jack Heyman retired from his job on the San Francisco docks
and from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) after
three decades of truly exemplary trade union work. We think that his
activism shows the great potential that exists for even a relatively
small number of class-conscious militants, guided by an
internationalist, socialist
perspective, to initiate radical political actions through their
unions that disrupt the machinery of capitalist oppression in profound
ways and point toward
fundamental social change.

We are honoured that Jack has accepted our invitation to speak at
Brock, and we plan to video-record the event so that thousands more
will be able to benefit from his and Bryan's talks on the internet.
Please make a special effort to attend, and encourage any potentially
interested people you know to turn out as well. Below is a link to a
tribute to Jack that appeared on the Counterpunch website last winter
shortly after his retirement. Read it and be inspired!

Murray Smith
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SOCIOLOGY SPEAKER SERIES 2011‐2012
Dr. June Corman & Dr. Ann Duffy
Wednesday February 15, 2012
10:00 a.m.‐12:00 p.m. Academic South 427
Personal Troubles, Public Issues: Rethinking the Personal‐Work Connection
Abstract:
We recently gave a presentation at an event hosted by the Niagara Workplace Planning Board. We stressed that current economic realities (dramatic reductions in good jobs, rapid expansion of marginalized and non-standard forms of employment) have negatively impacted many Canadian workers. Managing a suitable work-life balance is becoming increasingly problematic. Even more importantly, acquiring a secure job is extremely difficult in the Niagara Region. In discussing these
troublesome consequences of the new economy for individuals, families and communities, we developed concrete suggestions for how to reconceptualize the work-life nexus through a more cohesive approach to life and work. We suggested that employment support and services might be effectively embedded in larger conversations about civic involvement and personal well-being. Our talk for the speakers series summarizes this presentation and then reflects on what it means to do “public sociology”.
Everyone Is Welcome
Snacks will be provided
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Mapping the New Knowledges Graduate Student Research Conference Call for Proposals: Brock graduate students are invited to submit an oral and poster presentation for the April 11, 2012 conference.
Details are posted on the FGS website at http://brocku.ca/graduate-studies/conferences-events/2011-12-MNK
Deadline: March 5, 2012
Please discuss with students the important opportunity this presents as a way to develop their conference presentation skills and to get a conference presentation entry in their CV for future scholarship applications. This year, the conference will feature two new research prizes supported by Brock’s Youth University.
Also: Mark your calendar to attend Research Café II, “Living healthier, living better, living longer,” on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 4:30 to 6:45 p.m., Pond Inlet. Faculty and graduate student researchers from the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences will offer practical suggestions for healthy aging by developing a strategy that combines physical activity, fall prevention and a healthful diet into daily life. This is a free public event.
http://brocku.ca/graduate-studies/conferences-events/2011-12-MNK
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SOCIOLOGY SPEAKER SERIES 2011-2012
Dr. Margot Francis
Wednesday January 25th, 2012 (NOTE DATE CHANGE - from Jan. 18)
10:00 a.m.-12:uup.m. Academic South 427
Creative Subversions: Whiteness and Indigeneity in the National Imaginary
This presentation highlights selected moments from Creative Subversions
(UBC Press, 2011) to explore how whiteness and indigeneity are articulated
through taken-for-granted images of Canadian identity --and the contested
meanings these images evoke. I argue that benign, even kitschy symbols of
national identity are haunted by ideas about race, masculinity, and
sexuality that circulated during the formative years of AngloCanadian
nationhood. The talk invites us to question taken-for-granted ideas about
history, memory, and national identity.
Everyone Is Welcome
Snacks will be provided
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 What: "Civil Society and Subaltern Movements: Confrontations and Contradictions on the Anti-Globalization Terrain" - A Talk by Dr. Janet Conway, Canada Research Chair in Social Justice (as part of the 2011-2012 Sociology Department Speakers Series)

When: Wednesday; November 23, 2011; 1 pm - 3 pm; Room 427, Department of Sociology, Academic South

RSVP: As lunch will be provided, we'd greatly appreciate your RSVP. Please write to Lauren at lcorman@brocku.ca to confirm. Thank you!

The Department of Sociology is proud to host its 2011-2012 speakers series. The second talk will feature the scholarship of Dr. Janet Conway. Her presentation is entitled, "Civil Society and Subaltern Movements: Confrontations and Contradictions on the Anti-Globalization Terrain."

The purpose of the speakers series is to highlight the work of those within the Department and to foster discussion about their research.

This event is free. Everyone is welcome. Please forward this announcement to others!