Faculty & Staff

Graduate Program Director
Dr. Susan Tilley (July 1, 2010 - June 30, 2012)
Email: stilley@brocku.ca, ext. 3144

Administrative Co-Ordinator
Julia Gottli, STH 400B
Email: socialjustice@brocku.ca, ext. 5591
Fax: (905) 378-5733

SJES CORE FACULTY MEMBERS

PLEASE NOTE:  Faculty members may be on sabbatical and other forms of leave in any given year.  For further information contact the SJES Graduate Program Director.

ROB ALEXANDER
Associate Professor of English Language and Literature (ralexand@brocku.ca, Ext. 3886)
Robert Alexander is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. Formerly a reporter, he now directs Brock’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse Studies Program where he teaches courses in news writing, literary journalism, the history of language study, and creative writing. He has published articles on such topics as eighteenth century language theory, psychoanalysis and journalism, and the construction of gender in contemporary journalistic discourse. His current research is focused on journalistic subjectivity.  Web Profile

KATE BEZANSON
Associate Professor of Sociology (kbezanson@brocku.ca, Ext. 3457)
Kate Bezanson works in the areas of social and labour market policy, comparative and Canadian political economy, feminist and welfare state theory and international development.  Her current research projects centre around the dynamics of the reconfiguration of the Canadian welfare state in relation to families and family policy. Dr. Bezanson's  scholarship considers the ways in which households manage changes in labour markets, family forms and social policies.  Her recent publications include "Child Care Delivered through the Mailbox:  Social Reproduction, Neoliberalism and Choice in a Theo-Conservative Canada" in S. Bradley and M. Luxton (eds) Neoliberalism and Everyday Life (McGill-Queen's University Press 2010), Gender, the State and Social Reproduction: Household Insecurity in Neo-liberal Times (2006, University of Toronto Press), and Telling Tales: Living the Effects of Public Policy (2005, Fernwood Press, coauthored with S. Neysmith and A. O'Connell).  She is co-editor of Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism (2006, McGill-Queen's University Press) and Rethinking Society in the 21st Century (2008, CSPI).  She has also published on the topic of gender and social capital (see Canadian Review of Sociology 2006 vol.26, 2 and Status of Women Canada 2006).   Dr. Bezanson is involved in food security and local food initiatives and she has two young sons. Web Profile

DALE BRADLEY
Chair and Assistant Professor of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film (dbradley@brocku.ca, Ext. 3180)
Dale Bradley has published on technological history of office spaces, and on the political discourse of the Open Source software movement.  His primary research interests are centered upon on the historical emergence of techno society and, in particular, the critical analysis of the discourses and practices surrounding contemporary cyberculture. Web Profile

MARY BREUNIG
Associate Professor of Recreation and Leisure Studies (mbreunig@brocku.ca, Ext. 5387)
Professor Breunig teaches courses in experiential education and outdoor leadership. Her main areas of research include: outdoor and experiential education and issues of social and environmental justice; critical pedagogy and Freirean praxis; and outdoor experiential education within the Ontario K-12 schools. She is co-author of Outdoor Leadership: Theory and Practice and the Outdoor Classroom. She is co-editor of the Journal of Experiential Education and the author of Critical Pedagogy as Praxis. Web Profile

JONAH BUTOVSKY
Associate Professor of Sociology (jbutovsky@brocku.ca, Ext. 4371)
Jonah Butovsky is affiliated with the Centre for Labour Studies at Brock University. He has written articles on the New Democratic Party and on Canadian political values.  His current research is on migrant agricultural workers in Niagara and the representation of public opinion in the press. Web Profile

DAVID BUTZ
Professor of Geography (dbutz@brocku.ca, Ext. 3205)
David Butz teaches social and cultural geography, and qualitative research design. He is currently Director of the MA Program in Geography.  He has completed two SSHRC-funded research projects, one that examined colonial and contemporary labour relations in the mountains of northern Pakistan, and another dealing with the constitution of spatiality in Jamaican reggae music. He has also investigated the implications of corporate restructuring for General Motors auto workers in St. Catharines, Ontario. The three projects are linked by an interest in the geographies of exploitation, resistance and self-representation. The latter concern has led to some publications relating to research ethics and the method of autoethnography. Professor Butz has also published on irrigated mountain agriculture and sustainable development, and is involved with a number of grassroots political and environmental groups in Pakistan's Northern Areas. He is currently co-investigator with Nancy Cook on a SSHRC-funded study of the impacts of road construction on social organization in an agricultural village in northern Pakistan. He is co-editor of ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. Web Profile

JANET CONWAY
Associate Professor of Sociology (jconway@brocku.ca, Ext. 4196)
Janet Conway teaches in the areas of social movements, feminism, and democratic theory. She is the author of Praxis and Politics: Knowledge Production in Social Movements, Routledge, 2006 and Identity, Place, Knowledge: Social Movements Contesting Globalization, Fernwood, 2004. Her work has appeared in journals in sociology, law, politics, geography and women’s studies. Her current research focuses on the World Social Forum. She completed her PhD in Political Science at York University in 2002. She holds two Master’s degrees, Political Science (2000, York) and Theology (1990 University of St. Michael’s College) and a BA (Hons.) History (1984, Memorial) Before coming to Brock in 2007, she taught for five years at Ryerson University, Toronto in the Department of Politics and Public Administration. She is a long-time social justice activist in women’s and anti-poverty organizing, a founder of the Metro Network for Social Justice and founding chair of the Toronto Social Forum. Web Profile

NANCY COOK
Associate Professor of Sociology (ncook@brocku.ca, Ext. 3176)
Nancy Cook teaches and supervises in the areas of gender and sexuality, qualitative research methodologies, imperialism and globalization, gender relations in Pakistan, and feminist, postcolonial and poststructural theory. She has published a book and several articles on transcultural interactions between Western women development workers and local populations in northern Pakistan. Her current writing examines professional development workers who lived in Pakistan for an extended period of time to understanding how their experiences of working abroad have affected their lives back in Canada. In a new project she is studying the impacts of a newly opened road to Shimshal, northern Pakistan on women’s lives and gender relations in the village. Web Profile

JUNE CORMAN
Associate Dean, Undergraduate, Faculty of Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology (jcorman@brocku.ca, Ext. 4205)
June Corman is co-author (with Meg Luxton) of Getting By in Hard Times: Gendered Labour At Home and on the Job (University of Toronto Press, 2001), which received Honourable Mention for the John Porter Prize 2002. Research interests include: women and work, and social reproduction. She is author of articles on women working in the steel industry, in the education sector, and on farms.  Housed in Sociology, she is also involved with Women's Studies and Labour Studies. Web Profile

KERI CRONIN
Associate Professor of Visual Arts (keri.cronin@brocku.ca, Ext. 5306)
Keri Cronin teaches courses on the history of visual culture. Her research interests focus on the ways in which visual representations of the nonhuman world have historically shaped, challenged and, at times, subverted dominant human attitudes towards the species they share the planet with. Her current work explores the role of visual culture in 19th century animal welfare campaigns, a project which investigates connections between animal welfare activism and other types of campaigning that were taking place during the same historical moment. She is the editor of The Brock Review, (www.brocku.ca/brockreview) and a member of the organizing committee for "Greenscapes," an interdisciplinary conference which explores the cultural meanings of gardens in human society (www.brocku.ca/greenscapes). Web Profile

HEVINA DASHWOOD
Associate Professor of Political Science (hdashwood@brocku.ca, Ext. 3894)
Professor Dashwood’s broad research interests encompass international relations, international development and Canadian foreign policy.  Her current research on Canadian corporate social responsibility (CSR) was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).  Dashwood is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on CSR in the mining sector.  Dashwood is working on a book manuscript on corporate social responsibility and Canadian mining companies.  She is a collaborator with the Canadian Business Ethics Research Network (CBERN), the recipient of a $2.3 million SSHRC Strategic Clusters grant over seven years.  With CBERB as a partner, Dashwood is a co-investigator in a new (as of 2007) collaborative, multi-perspective case study project on Canadian mining companies in developing countries. Web Profile

MICHAEL DRIEDGER
Associate Professor of History (mdriedger@brocku.ca, Ext. 3972)
Michael Driedger is a specialist on the history of the Radical Reformation and its consequences, and his general research and teaching interests include the connection between religious radicalism and social change. His most recent book is on Bernhard Rothmann and the Reformation in Münster, 1530-35 (2009). His current research is on European Mennonites, with special regard to their involvement in the Radical Enlightenment and democratic reform movements in the eighteenth century. For the History Department he teaches courses on European intellectual and cultural history before 1850. He is also the director of the Program in Liberal Arts, and for the SJES Program he has supervised a thesis on the Clemente Program, a liberal arts education program with social justice goals. Web Profile

ANN DUFFY
Professor of Sociology (aduffy@brocku.ca, Ext. 3517)
Professor Duffy is currently publishing an interview-based book (with Professors Nancy Mandell and Sue Wilson) on mid-life women. She is also a participant in a major grant application which explores the international impact of the new economy on workers and their communities. Research interests include social inequality, paid and unpaid work and violence against women. Web Profile

THOMAS DUNK
Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology (tdunk@brocku.ca, Ext. 3425)
Thomas Dunk’s research program is in the area of linkages between economy, culture and society, with particular focus on class, masculinity, and economic transformation. He is the author of It’s a Working Man’s Town: Male Working Class Culture; the editor of Social Relations in Resource Hinterlands; and the co-editor of The Training Trap: Ideology, Training and the Labour Market. He is currently working on two SSHRC-funded projects: “Adaptation and Resistance to the Information Age in Natural Resource Dependent Regions in Canada and Norway,” and “Hunters, Bears, Masculinity and the Politics of Identity in Ontario and France.” Web Profile

IFEANYI EZEONU
Associate Professor of Sociology (iezeonu@brocku.ca, Ext. 4054)
Ifeanyi Ezeonu has published on the impact of neo-liberal economic policies on sub-Saharan Africa (with special focus on the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO) and the international politics of environmental protection. Research interests include: globalization and international development, gang violence, racialised crime, social construction of crime, transnational crime, environmental crime in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, and contemporary African Diaspora. Web Profile

MARGOT FRANCIS
Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies (margot.francis@brocku.ca, Ext. 5381)
Margot Francis teaches courses on queer communities and popular culture, the construction of race and gender in Canadian culture and contemporary feminist methods. Her research interests include: feminist and post-colonial perspectives on settler societies, critical explorations of culture, arts and identity and integrative approaches to gender, sexuality and the body. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at York University in the Department of Social Anthropology in Toronto, Ontario. Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in Theory and Policy Studies from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (2002). Dr. Francis' current research explores how images of Canadian identity work as raced, gendered and sexed metaphors that allow us to distance ourselves from those things which are closest to us -- concealing and revealing a host of contradictions. Her forthcoming book, 'Ghosts trying to find their clothes': Re-imagining Icons and Identities of the Canadian Nation (with UBC Press) highlights the work of Canadian artists who invite us to reconsider taken-for-granted ideas about power, memory and the nature of national identity. One of the central themes in this work is that real and imagined constructions of Aboriginal people have provided the basis for a conflicted set of racial projections that are crucial to the Canadian self-image.  She argues that what is distinctive about this process in Canada is how the tropes of 'Indianness' are deployed to re-inscribe Canada's peculiarly /benign /self- image. If most official representations of 'Indianness' signify Canada's commitment to the values of justice and racial harmony, she asks how these images might also contribute to cleansing the national memory. Consequently her work explores a contradiction: the relationship between banal symbols of national purpose and the ways a nation forgets its own implicatedness in a deeply racialized, gendered and sexed legacy. Web

TAMI J. FRIEDMAN
Associate Professor of History (tfriedman@brocku.ca, Ext. 3709)
Tami Friedman teaches 20th-century U.S. history at Brock. Her courses cover the U.S. history since 1865, U.S. foreign policy, the Cold War, the 1960s, women in North America, and class and capitalism in the United States. Her interests include labor history, women's history, racial/ethnic history, and the social history of economic change. Her research examines the causes and consequences of industry migration within the United States after World War II, with an emphasis on workers, communities, and industrial policy at the local, state, regional, and federal levels. Possible areas of supervision include: deindustrialization, capital flight, economic development policy, corporate globalization, corporate power, union growth and decline, sexual and racial divisions of labor, women and work, working-class culture, and class formation/identity. Web Profile

JENNIFER GOOD
Associate Professor of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film (jgood@brocku.ca, Ext. 3707)
Jennifer Good’s research and teaching interests sit at the intersection of the mass media, materialism and our relationship with the natural environment.  She has a B.A. in International Relations from U.B.C., a Master’s degree from York University in Environmental Studies and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Communication.  Current work includes looking at the mass communication of climate change, investigating how parents’ television viewing relates to their willingness to let their children play in the outdoors, and generally exploring the relationships between the mass media (television viewing in particular), materialism and environmentalism.  Web Profile

JANE HELLEINER
Professor of Sociology (jhelleiner@brocku.ca, Ext. 3711)
Jane Helleiner was trained in social/cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto.  She has conducted research in Ireland and Canada. Her current research examines differentiated local experience of a changing, stratified Canada/US border. Areas of graduate supervision include critical border studies, racism/antiracism, gender and sexuality, childhood and youth. Dr. Helleiner is on the editorial board for the journal Studies in Social Justice. Web Profile

TAMARI KITOSSA
Associate Professor of Sociology (tkitossa@brocku.ca, Ext. 5672)
Tamari Kitossa earned his BA from York University, MA from York University's Faculty of Education and his Ph.D from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Areas of course instruction include: critical perspectives on the criminal legal system, the sociology of law, punishment, and society. His research interests and publications include issues of racial profiling, the environment and racism. Dr. Kitossa's core research agenda examines the intersectionality of the social construction of crime, law breaking, media, and anti-African racism in western culture and Canadian society. His immediate research projects include a qualitative and quantative examination of race and representation in Canadian criminology and, with Dr. Katerina Deliovsky, he is also exploring repressive tolerance directed toward interracial couples. He  s Chair of the Brock/Niagara African Canadian Renaissance Group and Secretary to the Black Canadian Studies Association (http://bcsa.wordpress.com/the-bcsa/). 
Web Profile - Under Construction

DAN MALLECK
Associate Professor of Community Health Science (dmalleck@brocku.ca, Ext. 5108)
Dan Malleck teaches the history of medicine.  His areas of interest include drug and alcohol prohibition and control, inter-health-professional conflicts, medicalization, professionalization in the health sector, alternative medicine, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in health care.  His dissertation looked at the development of narcotic drug laws in Canada from the perspective of the growth of medical power and emerging moral panics around addictive substances.  His current research examines the development of liquor control in Ontario to see how notions of proper and improper drinking were constructed in the interwar period. He is also interested in less conventional teaching methods, notably Problem-Based Learning, Self-Directed Learning, and Community-Based Participatory Research.  He is also involved in international health research, contributing to projects addressing health issues related to poverty and inequality in Honduras. He is the editor-in-chief of the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal.  Web Profile

VOULA MARINOS
Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies (vmarinos@brocku.ca, Ext. 3386)
Voula Marinos received her M.A. and Ph.D in Criminology from the University of Toronto, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Faculty of Law, Queen's University. Her research is focused on sentencing and punishment of young and adult offenders, including public attitudes, plea-bargaining, short lengths of custody, accused persons with intellectual disabilities in the courtroom, and alternatives to imprisonment. Her current research includes extrajudicial measures under the YCJA for youth, probation for young offenders, and public attitudes towards plea-bargaining. Dr. Marinos teaches courses in the Department of Child & Youth Studies on youth and the law, young offenders, and sentencing and punishment. Web Profile

SHANNON MOORE
Director, Centre for Women’s Studies, Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies (smoore@brocku.ca, Ext. 5396)
Shannon Moore holds a PhD in Counseling Psychology from the University of Victoria. Her scholarship emphasizes community-based implementation of UN human rights and justice instruments. (e.g. UN Basic Principles for Restorative Justice, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities). This focus on social and transformational justice includes investigations that bridge education, critical theory, human rights and mental health. As a clinical counselor, Shannon Moore has practiced both privately and as a consultant within educational, social service, mental health and correctional service contexts in Canada and the United Kingdom.  Web Profile

CATHERINE JEAN NASH
Associate Professor of Geography (cnash@brocku.ca, Ext. 3238)
Catherine Nash teaches social and cultural geography with a focus on urban issues.  Catherine has a law degree from the University of Ottawa, an M.PL in Urban Planning from Queen’s University and a PhD from Queen’s University in urban geography. Catherine has taught courses on gender and geography, the philosophy of geography and concepts of power/knowledge and landscape.   Her current research focuses on gender, sexuality and space and, in particular, is concerned with the emerging fields of queer and trans scholarship. Catherine has published a number of articles and book chapters on historical aspects of Toronto’s “gay ghetto” and on contemporary queer spaces such as the Toronto’s women’s bathhouse events. Web Profile

TRENT NEWMEYER
Assistant Professor of Recreation and Leisure Studies (trent.newmeyer@brocku.ca, Ext. 5118)
Trent Newmeyer teaches the sociology of leisure, research methods (primarily qualitative research design), and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. His research interests include the social history of tourism and leisure, crafting as politics, and issues around HIV/AIDS from pregnancy planning to the use of crafting (body mapping) in mediating cultural stigma around HIV. Web Profile

JOSEPH NORRIS 

Professor of Dramatic Arts (jnorris@brocku.ca, Ext. 3596)

Joe Norris is professor of Drama in Education & Applied Theatre in the Department of Dramatic Arts, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts at Brock University. He advocates the arts as ways of knowing, doing and being. His book, “Playbuilding as Qualitative Research: A Participatory Arts-based Approach” purports that playbuilding is a legitimate research methodology and received The American Educational Research Association’s Qualitative Research SIG’s Outstanding Book Award in 2011. It documents how data generation, its interpretation, and its dissemination, all can be mediated through theatrical means. Using forum theatre he invites audiences to reconceptualize both the issues and themselves after the performance. His work with duoethnography furthers his interest in designing dialogic qualitative research methodologies that assist in the  reconceptualization of the world and of self. Driving his research agendas is the belief that an unreflected-life is a life half-lived and that we need the Other to assist us in understanding that which we cannot comprehend alone.   Web Profile

HIJIN PARK
Assistant Professor of Sociology (hijinpark@brocku.ca, Ext. 3540)
Hijin Park works in the area of anti-racist feminism. Her research and teaching interests include feminist criminology, refugee and migration studies, and securitization studies. She has published articles and book chapters on violence against racialized women, the criminalization of migration, and Canadian white settler nationalism. Web Profile

SHAUNA POMERANTZ 

Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies (shauna.pomerantz@brocku.ca, Ext. 5371)
Dr. Pomerantz is interested in the construction of youth and girlhood through the complimentary lenses of sociology and cultural studies. She focuses on how young people use cultural texts to make sense of themselves, each other, and the world around them, paying particular attention to the institution of the school, where teenagers must learn to negotiate complex social worlds and categories. She is also committed to doing qualitative research with young people, particularly interviews and ethnography. Her past projects include Girl Power, a long-term study of girls’ expressions of empowerment and understandings of feminism, and Dressing the Part, an ethnographic study of how girls used style to negotiate their identities in an urban, multicultural high school. Her current SSHRC-funded study (with Rebecca Raby), is entitled, Smart Girls: Negotiating Academic Success in a “Post-Feminist” Era. She received her PhD from the University of British Columbia, where she studied Sociology of Education and taught in the areas of feminisms, child and youth culture, and social justice. When not working, she likes to listen to indie rock, read popular teen novels, catch up on smart television shows, and hang out with her daughter, Miriam. Web Profile

MARIA DEL CARMEN SUESCUN POZAS
Assistant Professor of History (msuescunpozas@brocku.ca, Ext. 5145)
Maria del Carmen Suescun Pozas received her PhD from the Departments of History and Art History at McGill University, and her B.F.A from the Department of Fine Arts at Concordia University. She specializes in modern Latin America with a concentration on Colombia from the 1920s. Her publications open up general domains of study such as art and art institutions, literature, politics and economics to cultural analysis. Her current research, collaboration, and supervisory interests include truth, reconciliation and reparation, conflict resolution, memory and social change. Web Profile

REBECCA RABY
Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies (rraby@brocku.ca, Ext. 3172)
Dr. Raby is a sociologist whose research interests include gender and sexuality (particularly in childhood and youth); sociology of education, with a focus on school disciplinary and surveillance practices); constructions of childhood and adolescence, particularly how they are experienced by children and adolescents themselves; gender, race, class and sexual orientation as they intersect with childhood and adolescence; theories of rebellion, resistance and contestation among adolescents/youth; the relationship between adolescence and other life stages; and children and youth as active participants in research. She is currently investigating secondary school dress and discipline codes in the Niagara and Toronto regions: the language they use, and how they are created, applied and received. Web Profile

MARY-BETH RADDON
Associate Professor of Sociology (mraddon@brocku.ca, Ext. 3460)
Mary-Beth Raddon researches the sociology and politics of money, and the intersections of non-market and market economies.  Critical analysis of "the gift" is a core theme that ties together work on elite philanthropy, charitable giving and volunteering, inheritance, unpaid service and caring work.  She has a longstanding interest in community currencies: initiatives to create parallel local money systems that seek to generate meaningful work and convivial, sustainable, democratic and sovereign local economies.  Her book, Community and Money: Men and Women Making Change (Black Rose, 2003), shows how experimentation with new exchange networks exposes problems and injustices of the dominant economic system, including gendered patterns of reciprocity, exchange, work and shopping, identification of which helps point the way to new economic politics.  Professor Raddon teaches courses in research design, qualitative methods, and community-based and activist responses to poverty.  As an aspect of her critical pedagogy, she is particularly interested in designing course projects that help students bring their ideas to an audience.  This has led to student journalism, poster conferences, web sites, and an edited publication of student major research papers. Web Profile

MICHAEL RIPMEESTER
Professor of Geography (michael.ripmeester@brocku.ca, Ext. 4416)
Michael Ripmeester teaches cultural and historical geography. Professor Ripmeester earned his BA and MA in Geography from the University of British Columbia and his PhD from Queen’s University. His research has focused largely on two SSHRC funded projects exploring the ways in which control of space has been an integral component in the relationships between First Nations and colonial, and later federal, governments in nineteenth century Ontario. Interest in power relationships and landscapes has led to two other research projects. The first explored the ideological naturalization of the front lawn as the only appropriate landscape form for private green space. The second, affiliated with the SSHRC funded Popular Culture Niagara Research Group, focuses on the way public memory and public forgetting are manifest in local landscapes.  Professor Ripmeester has served as the Chair of the Native Canadian Study Group (associated with the Canadian Association of Geographers), as a Member of Council of the Champlain Society, and the Cultural Geography Specialty Group Awards Committee (associated with the American Association of Geographers). He has also served as a consultant for the Alderville First Nation and for the Thousand Islands Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve Project. Web Profile

JENNIFER ROWSELL

Canada Research Chair in Multiliteracies, Associate Professor of Education (jrowsell@brocku.ca, Ext. 6121)

Jennifer Rowsell's work focuses on redefining literacy in a digital, multimodal world. Working across age groups and across contexts, she examines literacy as a social practice and the roles of context, identity, text, and practices in how people make meaning. She teaches in the areas of new literacies, New Literacy Studies, digital literacies, multimodality, multiliteracies, and socio-cultural approaches to literacy education. Her work often draws on such theorists as Pierre Bourdieu, Gunther Kress, James Paul Gee, Brian Street, Bruno Latour, Clifford Geertz, and other theorists working in the areas of literacy, material culture, cultural studies, and digital humanities. She has written and co-written books that are theoretical and practical in nature. She has conducted several empirical studies with high school students; producers of new and digital media; primary and elementary school children at home, at school, and out in the community; and, adult learners and, in particular, parents of small children. Her focal methodology tends to be ethnography and ecological approaches to data collection. She collects artifacts and texts from research participants and focuses on their implications for meaning-making. She has been published in the following journals: Reading Research Quarterly, Qualitative Research, Teaching Education, The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, The Reading Teacher, Literacy, The Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and Visual Communication. She is currently writing a book for Routledge on modal learning entitled, Doing Multimodality: Voices from the Field. Web Profile

JOHN SORENSON
Professor of Sociology (jsorenson@brocku.ca, Ext. 4369)
John Sorenson gives courses on animals and society, racism, and corporate globalization.  Much of his research has been on war, nationalism and refugees and he has been active in solidarity groups in Africa, Asia, Central America and the Middle East. He was also actively engaged in humanitarian relief work in the Horn of Africa with the Eritrean Relief Association. His most recent book is Ape (forthcoming from Reaktion Press) and other books 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.  In 2006 he received a three-year SSHRC research grant to investigate animal advocacy as a social justice movement. Web Profile


DENNIS SORON
Associate Professor of Sociology (dsoron@brocku.ca, Ext. 3458)
Dennis Soron's teaching and research interests include social and cultural theory, the political economy of consumption, radical ecology, and the intersection of labour and environmental politics. He has published various book chapters, articles, and interviews on consumerism, work, the environment, and the issue of depoliticization. He is (with Gordon Laxer) the co-editor of Not For Sale: Decommodifying Public Life (Broadview/Garamond, 2006). Web Profile

SUSAN SPEAREY
Associate Professor of English Language and Literature (sspearey@brocku.ca, Ext. 3885)
Susan Spearey teaches courses in postcolonial literature, literature of trauma and recovery, historiography, South African literatures of transition, critical theory, women’s literature and social justice and the arts, in addition to graduate seminars on research skills. She has published articles focused on literary explorations of displacement, dispossession and the ethics of redress in post-conflict societies. Research interests include trauma theory, theories of spatiality, violence and embodiment, and the ethics of readership. She holds a SSHRC GRG grant for a project entitled “Talking Liberties/ Talking Terror/ Talking Cure: Narratives of Emergence and States of Emergency in South African Literature of Transition;” and she is co-recipient (with David Fancy of Dramatic Arts) of a Chancellor’s Chair for Excellence in teaching for a project that investigates the use of secular mindfulness techniques and embodiment practices in the teaching of critical theory.  Web Profile

NANCY TABER
Associate Professor of Education (ntaber@brocku.ca, ext 4218)

Nancy Taber's work focuses on the sociocultural implications of education/learning. She teaches in the areas of critical adult education, sociocultural contexts of education, and learning gender in a militarized world. Her work often draws on her experiences serving in the Canadian military for 13 years, with much of that time as a Sea King helicopter air navigator. She has engaged in a critique of militarism from her own perspective and that of other military mothers (with a focus on learning masculinities and femininities in military communities of practice), and is now exploring gendered issues of militarism in children's fiction and school curricula. She has recently completed research focusing on a girl empowerment book club for struggling readers. She is interested in feminist methodologies, such as institutional ethnography, feminist discourse analysis, and life history. Nancy has published in journals such as Adult Education Quarterly, International Journal for Lifelong Education, Studies in Continuing Education, Gender and Education, Children's Literature in Education, and Qualitative Research.  She is currently working on a book tentatively titled, How military life informs academic life: Gendered organizations and masculine norms. Web Profile

SUSAN TILLEY

Graduate Program Director, Social Justice and Equity Studies, Professor of Education (stilley@brocku.ca, Ext. 3144)
Susan Tilley has worked as both teacher and curriculum coordinator in public school contexts. Her interest in social justice and equity became more formalized as a result of the critical ethnography she conducted with women attending a school while incarcerated in a federal-provincial prison. She teaches graduate courses in curriculum theory, contemporary issues in curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies in the Faculty of Education. Her research interests include curriculum, teacher education, antiracism, critical white studies, pedagogical practices, research ethics, qualitative research, teacher research, critical ethnography, and education in alternative sites. She began her term as Graduate Director of the MA in Social Justice and Equity Studies July 2010. Web Profile

EBRU USTUNDAG
Associate Professor of Geography (eustundag@brocku.ca, Ext. 4417)
Ebru Ustundag teaches courses on community development, urban planning, cities and globalization. She has a BSc (Political Science and Public Administration) and MSc (Urban Policy Planning and Local Governments) degrees from Middle East Technical University (Turkey) and Ph.D. (Geography) from York University. Her doctoral dissertation ‘Turkish republican citizenship and rights to the city’ analyzes the constitutions, contestations and transformations of the Turkish republican project’s citizenship practices and strategies, through the spaces of a historical neighborhood in Istanbul: Beyoðlu. In so doing, it establishes the link that has been neglected between the city and citizenship in studies on Turkish republicanism, citizenship and nationalism. Currently she is working on two projects: ‘Women and Awqaf in Ottoman Istanbul’ (with Professor Engin Isin) and ‘Security Discourses and Democratic Paradoxes’. Her major areas of interest are: theories of space and cities, citizenship studies, feminist geographies, urban geographies as well as political and cultural geographies of Middle East. Web Profile