• Unions and Labour Movements
• Working-Class Politics
• Care Work and Social Reproduction
• Racism, Racialization, and Work
• Social Movement Organizing, Collective Action, and Social Change
• Labour, Cities, and Urban Inequality
• Marxist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Theory

My areas of research and teaching expertise include the interaction of labour rights and the Charter, industrial relations, labour and employment law, as well as human rights in the workplace.

My research focuses on prison labour, labour movement renewal, and new forms of worker organization.

In general, I study the history of theories and practices of justice, as well as democratic theory and social inequality. Recently, my research has focused on the role of public sector workers in democratizing governance and administration, and on new forms of labour organizing among precarious workers in the airline industry. In 2017, I received the Dissertation Prize from York University. My edited volume, From the Streets to the State: Changing the World by Taking Power (State University of New York Press 2018), will be released in paperback in 2019.

My research focuses primarily on the politics of organized labour in Canada. Recent research has revolved around the changing nature of party-union relations, the strategic use of rights discourse and the constitutional politics of labour.

My teaching involves quantitative methods and political sociology. I am currently working on a project that examines the political potential of Canadian popular music and another that studies the effects of left-nationalism on the development of Canadian socialism.

My research focuses on the causes and consequences of economic restructuring in the post-World War II United States, with an emphasis on how capital migration and deindustrialization have transformed workers, communities, industrial policy (at the local, state, regional, and federal levels), and national politics.

Thomas Dunk’s research interests focus on linkages between economy, culture, and society, with a specific focus on class, masculinities, and economic transformation. He is the author of It’s a Working Man’s Town: Male Working-Class Culture; editor of Social Relations in Resource Hinterlands and Marginal Zones in the Age of Globalization: Case Studies from the North and South; and co-editor with Randle Nelsen and Stephen McBride of The Training Trap: Ideology, Training, and the Labour Market. He has also published articles and book chapters on workers and environmentalism, whiteness and working-class identity, deindustrialization, hunting, and neoliberalism. His current research concerns the application of the concept of the circular bioeconomy in the forest industry, as well as industrial ruination and its link to populism and masculinities in resource hinterland regions as witnessed in controversies about hunting, animal rights, and environmentalism.

My research is in the area of the sociology of higher education with a focus on the regulation of academic work. Recent research investigates the regulation of academic work (the production of knowledge, forms of knowledge) in the context of accountability governance.