People in our Program

Over 50 SJES faculty are affiliated with this interdisciplinary program while remaining members of their home departments in the faculties of Applied Health Sciences, Education, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

Staff

Graduate Program Director 
Dr. Trent S. Newmeyer
Office: STH 419
905-688-5550 x5118
tnewmeyer@brocku.ca

Graduate Administrative Coordinator
Ginny McKinney
Office: STH 400B 
905-688-5550 x5591
socialjustice@brocku.ca

Office hours: 
Tuesday:  8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Wednesday:  8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Thursday:  8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. off site

Faculty of Applied Health Sciences

Maureen Connolly

Professor, Kinesiology
Office: WC 271
905-688-5550 x3381
mconnolly@brocku.ca

Maureen Connolly is committed to inclusive educational and service provision practices for persons experiencing disability. She has developed numerous programs in Niagara that provide individualized and dignified adaptive movement programs for persons experiencing disability. In addition, she has created professional development programs for practitioners who desire or are required to be inclusive and adaptive.

Maureen Connolly has published in areas of pedagogy and teacher education emphasizing inclusion and relevant, authentic teaching and learning. A recent publication in the journal Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly develops an interdisciplinary dialogue between the fields of critical pedagogy and neurodiversity with a focus on neurodiversity, mental health and mental illness.

Within the SJES program, Maureen is interested in being more involved in supervisory work with graduate students interested in interrogating normalcy and advocating for authentic inclusion.

Joanne Crawford

Associate Professor, Nursing
Office:EA 322, Building 3
905-688-5550 x4363
jcrawford2@brocku.ca

Joanne Crawford has been an advocate for health equity throughout her career in clinical nursing practice, education and research. Emerging from public health practice, she has been engaged in health services research exploring health disparities related to access to preventive health services among priority populations (Indigenous, newcomer immigrant, and low-income communities) across key jurisdictions in Ontario, and social exclusion of immigrant women in the Niagara Region. She has experience with conducting community-based studies including participatory action research, different review methodologies, focus groups, survey design, and mixed methods.

Michele Donnelly

Assistant Professor, Sport Management
Office: STH 436
905-688-5550 x4351
mdonnelly2@brocku.ca

Michele Donnelly was first attracted to the sociology of sport for the opportunity to study and address social inequality. In the Department of Sport Management, she trains students to engage critically with their own and others’ investments in sport and physical activity. She encourages students to ask questions about who is included and who is excluded from the sport activities and spaces in which students feel so comfortable, reminding them to consider who is not in the room because they do not have access to sport or have not had positive experiences. If students believe that sport can accomplish the goals they claim, e.g., bring people together, they must be able to identify under what conditions, and for what groups of people, this might be possible.

Michele’s research focuses on social inequality, particularly issues related to gender, within Olympic and international sport federation policy and governance, and athlete-driven sport organizations (such as the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association). Ongoing projects in this area focus on gender equality in the Olympic Movement and at the Olympic Games, as well as in the governance of provincial, national, and international sport organizations. She was a principal author of the London 2012 and Sochi 2014 gender audit reports, which now serve as baselines to assess the changes made toward gender equality at the Olympic Games.

Michele also researches alternative sport and sport subcultures (roller derby, skateboarding), with a research focus on girls and women onlyness. She uses qualitative research methods while also studying research ethics and the politics of research with respect to qualitative methods.

Michele will be thrilled to work with graduate students and faculty in the SJES program to employ sport, physical activity, and physical culture as empirical sites for both the study and promotion of social justice and equity.

Curtis Fogel

Associate Professor, Sport Management
Office: STH 447
905-688-5550 x4617
cfogel@brocku.ca

Curtis Fogel’s research examines crime, corruption, violence, doping, discrimination, and other social and legal issues in the context of sport. He completed graduate degrees in both Sociology (M.A. and Ph.D) and Law (LL.M). He is author of the books Game-Day-Gangsters: Crime and Deviance in Canadian Football (2013) and Controversies in Law and Sport (2017), editor of Critical Perspectives on Gender and Sport (Forthcoming), and co-editor of Imaginative Inquiry: Innovative Approaches to Interdisciplinary Research (2014) and Sexual Violence at Canadian Universities: Activism, Institutional Responses, and Strategies for Change (2017). Three research projects he is currently working on include: 1) On the Sidelines: Sexual Violence in Canadian Youth Sport, 2) Rink Rage: Spectator Violence and Harassment in Canadian Hockey (with Kevin Mongeon), and 3) Blood on the Pitch: Socio-Legal Aspects of Rugby Violence.

Curtis has supervised graduate students on topics including hazing rituals in Canadian hockey, victim blaming of sexual assault survivors, and criminal violence in sport. He is interested in supervising student research in the areas of human rights law, criminal law and justice, sport and social justice, and interpersonal violence that use qualitative interviewing, observations, and/or unobtrusive methods.

Dawn Trussell

Professor, Sport Management
Office: STH 451
905-688-5550 x4580
dtrussell@brocku.ca

Broadly defined, my research focuses on leisure and sport culture in the lives of individuals, families, and communities. I seek to understand diverse social contexts and issues of power and social inclusion, particularly related to constructs of family, children and youth, gender and sexual diversity, and rurality. My work has a social justice orientation and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Sport Canada’s Research Initiative. I was recently appointed to the scientific committee of the Canadian Gender Equity and Sport Research Hub and I am the Vice-President for the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies.

Faculty of Education

Diane Collier

Associate Professor, Education
Office: WH 364
905-688-5550 x6146
diane.collier@brocku.ca

Diane Collier is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University. She conducts research in the areas of multimodalities and literacies with a special interest in connections across home and school. Using qualitative, collaborative and arts-informed methodologies, her work focuses on the processes of making and literacies, how children use everyday resources (particularly, popular culture), and what can be learned from children about their consumption and production of multimodal, cultural, and digital texts. Diane is interested in ethical considerations of how children and youth participate in research and how power circulates in research relationships.

Debra Harwood

Associate Professor, Education
Office: WH 373
905-688-5550 x5873
dharwood@brocku.ca

Debra Harwood conducts research in area of Early Childhood Education (ECE). Often, ECE as a discipline operates on the periphery and outside of the dominant discourses of education. Thus, legitimizing the basic tenants of ECE means challenging the social, political, cultural, and historical forces that have opposed central ideas such as care, professionalism, child agency, place, and intra-active pedagogy. Debra has been involved in research focused on community capacity building initiatives in the Niagara region, specifically focusing on the young child and their worlds, family engagement, educator professionalism, and ethical research practices with young children and their families. Her most recent project involves a three year ethnographic study of young children’s entanglements within a forest, specifically examining how relationships with the more-than-human world might foster ways of being that support a more sustainable planet.

Rajiv Jhangiani

Vice Provost, Teaching and Learning
905-688-5550 x4361
rjhangiani@brocku.ca

Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani is the Vice Provost, Teaching and Learning at Brock University. He holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Educational Studies and Psychology, directs the Inclusive Education Research Lab, and is affiliated with the Social Justice Research Institute. The architect of Canada’s first zero textbook cost degree programs, his scholarship currently focuses on open educational practices, equitable access to education, student-centered pedagogies, and ethical approaches to educational technology. His publications include peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, three open textbooks in Psychology, and two co-edited volumes, Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science  and Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education. Together with Dr. Robin DeRosa, he is a co-founder of the Open Pedagogy Notebook.

Nancy Taber

Professor, Adult Education Program Director, Brock University
ntaber@brocku.ca
nancytaber.ca

Dr. Nancy Taber is a professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Brock University. Her research explores the ways in which learning, gender, and militarism intersect in daily life, popular culture, museums, militaries, and educational institutions. She has a particular focus on women’s experiences in the Canadian Armed Forces as relates to organizational culture, official polices, and informal everyday practices, with respect to gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. She is a retired military officer who served as a Sea King helicopter air navigator.  Dr. Taber is a former President of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education. She is currently using the genre of fiction to explore the complexities of women’s lives as relates to war and militarism.

Leanne Taylor

Associate Professor, Education
Office: WH 271
905-688-5550 x4965
leanne.taylor@brocku.ca

Leanne Taylor teaches courses addressing the sociocultural contexts of education, including diversity and equity issues in schooling and the interrelationship between pedagogy, culture and identity. Her ongoing research explores the social construction of racialized identities; multiracial discourses and critiques of critical ‘mixed race’ theory; transnational and immigrant student aspirations; the experiences of marginalized and ‘at risk’ youth in secondary and postsecondary schools; and the effects of school policies and teacher conduct on student experiences. A key focus of her work addresses how education that strives to be equitable and socially just must continually engage with the complexities of race and ethnicity, including multiracial experiences. She is currently investigating the use of digital media as a way of fostering teacher candidates’ engagement with social justice and equity issues in education.

Faculty of Humanities

Rob Alexander

Associate Professor, English Language and Literature
Office: GLN 139
905-688-5550 x3886
ralexander@brocku.ca

Robert Alexander is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. Formerly a reporter, he works in Brock’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse Studies Program where he teaches courses in literary journalism, creative nonfiction, and the history of language study. He has published articles on such topics as eighteenth-century language theory, the construction of gender in contemporary journalistic discourse, and journalist-source relations. His current research projects are focused on journalistic subjectivity and the potential of long-form narrative journalism to contest the anthropocentric bias of mainstream news.

Gale Coskan-Johnson

Director, Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse Studies
Associate Professor, English Language and Literature
Office: GLN 133
905-688-5550 x5001
gcoskanjohnson@brocku.ca

My research explores the entangled discourses of sovereign power and transnational migration. I examine national and international state-based texts and the responses and reverberations of these texts in public discourses. I am interested in the ways that “official” texts that would once have spoken to a select, “expert” audience have become widely and idiosyncratically available to various publics because of the increasing and at times unplanned digitalization of such documents. I am particularly interested in the ways that the publicity of such texts influences public discourses of immigration, labour, race, gender, ethnicity, and language, and how they might influence perceptions of home, away, us and them.

My current major research project, “(Il)legal, (Ir)regular, (Un)documented: Rhetorics of Sovereignty and Transnational Migration,” examines tensions that emerge in national and international discourses of transnational migration. I welcome supervisions around the intersections of rhetorical studies and social justice, including work linked to border studies, transnational migration, human rights, transnational feminism, the nation and its nationalisms, the critical study of global Englishes, and postcolonial studies.

Keri Cronin

Professor, Visual Arts
Office: MWS 335
905-688-5550 x5306
keri.cronin@brocku.ca

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. She is the author of Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870-1914 (Penn State University Press) and the co-founder (with Jo-Anne McArthur) of The Unbound Project, a multimedia project celebrating women in animal advocacy (https://unboundproject.org/). Her current SSHRC-funded research project is an exploration of human-animal history in the Niagara region.

Tamara El-Hoss

Associate Professor, Modern Languages
Office: MCA 231
905-688-5550 x5212
telhoss@brocku.ca

Tamara El-Hoss has been teaching undergraduate courses on postcolonial Francophone literatures and cultures at Brock since July 2005 and has taught graduate courses on postcolonial theories and literatures in SCLA (Studies in Comparative Literature and the Arts) for the last decade.  Her research recognizes that the current global migrant crisis has inspired numerous comics artists/journalists and graphic novelists to draw and tell the stories of refugees and migrants to a Western audience. As a medium, comics, bandes dessinées and graphic novels cross linguistic barriers, give a voice to the voiceless, and facilitate communication across boundaries. Her current research project, entitled “Visual Vox Digital Archive: Displacement in Comics, Graphic Novels, Bandes Dessinées and Zines”, is to curate a multi-layered open source digital archive on ‘drawing displacement’ in Africa and the Middle East that will be accessible to students, scholars, artists and the general public.

The archive will include material in comics (traditional North American soft cover format), graphic novels (longer format resembling a traditional book, often with a single storyline), bandes dessinées (French language comics) and zines (self-published work combining  texts and images) for a bilingual collection, located on Brock’s server. The Visual Vox Digital Archive will be the first digital archive of its kind, especially in that it provides a space for under-represented perspectives, e.g. from African and Middle Eastern migrants and artists.  Tamara is the co-editor of a bilingual collection of essays entitled Im/migrant Passages: Crossing Visual, Spatial and Textual Boundaries (forthcoming in July 2020, Small Walker Press).

Tami Friedman

Associate Professor, History
Office: GLN 225
905-688-5550 x3709
tfriedman@brocku.ca

Tami Friedman teaches 20th-century U.S. history at Brock. Her courses cover 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. She also teaches a graduate course on women and work in U.S. history. Her interests include labour 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. Her publications explore the relationship between economic restructuring and such developments as the decline of organized labour, the rise of the modern Right and the limits of unionism in the U.S. South. Possible areas of supervision include: deindustrialization, capital flight, economic development policy, corporate globalization, corporate power, union growth and decline, sexual and racial/ethnic divisions of labour, women and work, working-class culture and class formation/identity.

Tim Kenyon

Vice President, Research
905-688-5550 x3127
tkenyon@brocku.ca

Tim Kenyon’s research in social epistemology focuses on testimony and disagreement, as well as the epistemology of ignorance, issues of epistemic injustice, and non-ideal theory. These topics are naturally informed by feminist epistemology and epistemology that foregrounds race, gender, and class. One application may be seen in this short lecture at a teach-in: “Rape culture and ignorance”. Tim’s work in the philosophy of language includes the nature of coerced assertions, which has implications for understanding how coercive social, economic, and political influences can shape personal and public discourse, and perceptions of received views. He is currently writing also on political bullshit, and its recent uses by authoritarian and populist leaders.

Tim has published on debiasing techniques for cognitive and social biases, and especially on the problem of how to teach and learn the building blocks for effective debiasing strategies. His graduate mentorship has included students working on issues of autonomy and respect for atypical or marginalized groups, including a PhD dissertation on how to support robust decision-making for persons with forms of dementia, and a PhD dissertation on epistemic injustice, focusing on respect for persons with cognitive or developmental disabilities as knowers.

Tim developed and ran a Philosophical Café discussion group in the Grand Valley Institution (the federal correctional facility for women in Kitchener), through Community Justice Initiative’s Stride Night program, as well as a successor program that ran through the St. Catharines YWCA. These programs are motivated by a belief in the emancipatory virtues of philosophical reflection and powers of expression.

Maria Del Carmen Suescun Pozas

Associate Professor, History
Office: GLN 243
905-688-5550 x5145
msuescunpozas@brocku.ca

Maria del Carmen Suescun Pozas trained as a visual artist (B.F.A.), art historian (M.A. and Ph.D.), and historian (Ph.D.). Her teaching at the undergraduate level focuses on the social and cultural history of Latin America from the sixteenth century up to the present, in particular the Colonial and Republican periods; revolutions; and race, class and gender. At the fourth year and graduate level, her teaching focuses on Canada-Latin America and Caribbean relations; social change; narrative and the visual field; multi- and/or inter-disciplinary approaches; and comparative analysis. Her publications explore the cultural history of 1930s-1940s Colombia; art, politics, and gender; memory and history; art, art history and history as complementary disciplines; grounded approaches to development issues; solidarity, empathy in art and culture; and Latin America and the Caribbean made in Canada.

She has supervised graduate work of students at Brock and internationally in History, History and Art History as complementary disciplines, and on Film and Literature in comparative perspective. She also supervises international exchange students. She welcomes directed graduate reading courses and graduate supervision in her disciplines and subjects of interest. She is also interested in supporting graduate students develop collaborative/team research and community partnerships locally and internationally, and get involved in helping advance knowledge, develop talent, and forge connections from an early stage of their training as junior scholars.

Gyllian Raby

Associate Professor, Dramatic Arts
Office: MWS 307
905-688-5550 x3221
graby@brocku.ca

Gyllian Raby is a Canadian theatre artist of Welsh origin. She was the founding artistic director of One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre in Calgary (1981-88), chronicled in Martin Morrow’s book “Wild Theatre”. At OYR, she devised original work using a creative process of “contracting audiences with available light”. Her interests include theatre a feminist prescriptive political exploration of social justice, the group dynamics of devising, theatre about Science culture, and adapting classics to contemporary contexts in a “writing back” process. As Artistic Director of Northern Light Theatre in Edmonton (1988-93), Gyllian collaborated with Ray Bradbury and Robert Lepage on large scale tours. Following this, she worked across Canada and in the USA as a freelance director, dramaturge, and playwright/adaptor.

She has taught on faculty at University of Manitoba, University of King’s College, University of Cincinnati, Xavier University Ohio, and Queen’s University. At Brock University since 2001, her SSHRC-funded project Commotion resulted in a documentary film that received the Prestige gold medal film award for educational documentary film, 2015.

Her adaptation of Nicolai Erdman’s The Suicide played in Cincinnati (U.S.) Cork (Ireland) and Florida (U.S.) and London (U.K.). Her plays The Ash Mouth Man (co-authored with Danielle Wilson) and We Who Know Nothing About Hiawatha Are Proud to Present Hiawatha (company devised) were produced by Ontario’s In The Soil Festival as was A Glass of Wine with Noam Chomsky (2019, with Fede Holten-Andersen).

Susan Spearey

Associate Professor, English Language and Literature
Office: GLN 143
905-688-5550 x3885
sspearey@brocku.ca

Susan Spearey’s research interests focus on literary/cultural responses to contemporary histories of mass violence, on the one hand, and to projects of transitional justice and social reconstruction, on the other. She also works on pedagogy, witnessing and the ethics of reception. Courses taught include Literature of Trauma and Recovery, Postcolonial Literature, South African Literatures of Transition, Textualizing Post-conflict Histories, Social Justice and the Arts, literary theory and graduate seminars on research skills.

Faculty of Social Sciences

Kate Bezanson

Professor of Sociology
Office: STH 401
905-688-5550 x6352
kbezanson@brocku.ca

Kate Bezanson is a Professor, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a faculty affiliate with the Social Justice and Equity Studies program. Specializing in political economy, gender, social/family/labor market policy and constitutional law, she is co-investigator (with Dr. Andrea Doucet) on a 7-year partnership Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded grant on the best policy mix for diverse Canadian families.

Dr. Bezanson also serves as a University Senator and serves on the editorial board of the Canadian Review of Sociology.

Her current research involves assessments of gender, Canadian social policy, federalism, public law, governance, budgeting and taxation, social reproduction, parental and other leaves, and child care.

Simon Black

Assistant Professor, Labour Studies
Office:PLZ 333
905-688-5550 x5350
simon.black@brocku.ca

My current research employs a feminist political economy approach to the study of work and labor in urban, national, and transnational contexts. At the highest level of abstraction, I use the feminist political economy as an interdisciplinary, historical, and comparative approach to studying social relations of production and social reproduction. More specifically, my research explores how race, class, gender, citizenship/migration shape social reproduction and the organization of both paid and unpaid work.

My work is also concerned with praxis and resistance and particularly union strategies and “alt-labour” formations such as worker centers and other non-union labour organizations. I also have a longstanding research interest in the labour of sport and professional athletes as workers.

Robyn Bourgeois

Associate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies
Office: MC D330
905-688-5550 x6650

Dr. Robyn Bourgeois (Laughing Otter Caring Woman) is a mixed race nehiyaw iskwew whose Cree family comes from Treaty 8 (Lesser Slave Lake) territory. She is also connected through her three children to the Six Nations of the Grand River. Dr. Bourgeois holds a BA in Sociology from Okanagan University College (now UBC-Okanagan), an MA in Sociology from UBC-Vancouver, and a PhD in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto.

Dr. Bourgeois’ primary areas of scholarly interest include violence against indigenous women and girls; indigenous feminisms; and indigenous women’s political leadership; alongside issues of gender and violence generally (with a particular focus on serial murder, state-based violence, violence perpetrated by women, and violence in popular culture). As a survivor of sexual exploitation and other forms of violence, Robyn has committed her life to end all forms of violence and has been involved in indigenous and/or feminist political organizing from the grassroots to international levels for more than twenty years. In addition to being an academic and activist, Dr. Bourgeois is also an artist.

Alison Braley-Rattai

Associate Professor, Labour Studies
abraleyrattai@brocku.ca

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.

David Butz

Professor, Geography
Office: MC C315
905-688-5550 x3205
dbutz@brocku.ca

David Butz teaches sonic geographies, geographies of international development, political ecology of the Global South and qualitative research design. 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 interest in the geographies of exploitation, resistance and self-representation.

The latter concern has led to 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 grassroots political and environmental activism in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. He is currently co-investigator with Nancy Cook on an SSHRC-funded study of the impacts of road construction on social organization in an agricultural village in northern Pakistan. He and Dr. Cook are also studying the implications of food relief for local agricultural production in northern Pakistan, and are in the midst of on an “autophotography” project, also in northern Pakistan and funded by the Brock Council for Research in the Social Sciences. He is on the Faculty Steering Committee of Brock’s Social Justice Research Institute, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Studies in Social Justice, and editorial board member of three journals.

Liz Clarke

Assistant Professor of Communication, Popular Culture and Film
905-688-5550 x6705
lclarke@brocku.ca

Liz Clarke (PhD Wilfrid Laurier University) teaches classes in popular narrative, serial storytelling, film history, film theory, film and TV genres, and gender film and TV. Her research examines women in film and television both on and off the screen. Her current book project is on women in war films from 1908 to 1918. She also researches women writers in film and television from the silent period to contemporary female showrunners.

I am happy to supervise projects in the following areas:

  • the war film
  • silent film
  • screenwriting history (particularly women screenwriters) and women in film and television production
  • seriality
  • television and streaming services

Nancy Cook

Professor, Sociology
Office: STH 416
905-688-5550 x3176
ncook@brocku.ca

Nancy Cook teaches and supervises in the areas of gender and sexuality, qualitative research methodologies, imperialism and globalization, gender relations in Pakistan, critical mobilities studies, 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. An interest in transcultural interactions extends through more recent work on professional development workers who lived in Pakistan for an extended period of time to understanding how their experiences of working abroad have affected their cosmopolitan lives back in Canada. In her current research she is studying the differential mobility implications of a jeep road linking Shimshal village to the Karakoram Highway in northern Pakistan, and on demobilizations experienced by other villagers in the region in the aftermath of a landslide disaster that destroyed a large section of this highway. This research develops understandings of mobility justice, mobility disaster and the gendered constitution of mobility.

Nancy Cook is a core faculty member in the graduate programs of Critical Sociology and Social Justice and Equity Studies, and an affiliate of the Social Justice Research Institute.

Lauren Corman

Associate Professor, Sociology
Office: STH 404
905-688-5550 x5080
lcorman@brocku.ca

Lauren Corman is an environmental sociologist who teaches in the areas of environmental thought, contemporary social theory, and critical animal studies. Her research centralizes anti-racist, anti-colonial, queer, and feminist understandings of social relations and the more-than-human world. Broadly, her scholarship investigates the agency, resistance, and subjectivities of oppressed groups. Dr. Corman is interested in coalition-building across social and environmental justice movements and links her work to larger anti-capitalist analyses and struggles. She hosted the radio show, Animal Voices (animalvoices.ca), for about a decade. She recently published, “He(a)rd: Animal Cultures and Anti-Colonial Politics,” in Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor’s collection, Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies (Routledge, 2020). Dr. Corman is currently working on a text about the cultural histories of particularly vilified animals and their relationships to colonial legacies.

Dan Cui

Assistant Professor, Child and Youth Studies
Office: CRN 335
905-688-5550 x4548
dcui@brocku.ca

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies. I received my PhD degree in the Theoretical, Cultural and International Studies in Education at the University of Alberta. Before joining the Brock University, I held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of British Columbia (2015-17). My research interests include immigrant and refugee youth, international students, the intersectionality of race, gender, and class, sociology of education, immigration, integration, and transnationalism, agency/resilience, social justice and equity in education, and qualitative research methodology.

My two ongoing SSHRC projects respectively focus on examining the integration of racialized minority immigrant youth in Canada and the United States, and the immigration and employment transition of international students. As a critical scholar and educator, the purpose of my research is to identify, explore and analyze the marginalization, discrimination and oppression that subordinated groups experience in the North American societies. The goal of my research is to get the silenced voice heard, address social problems (e.g., racism, sexism, classism, and etc.), and look for socially just solutions.

Hevina Dashwood

Professor, Political Science
Office: PLZ 337
905-688-5550 x3894
hdashwood@brocku.ca

Dashwood’s research interests within international relations encompass international development, the role of non-state actors in global governance, and Canadian foreign policy. Her current research is concerned with corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the extractive sector. Dashwood’s book on corporate social responsibility and Canadian mining companies was recently published by Cambridge University Press 2012. This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), through a Standard Research Grant (SRG).

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 CBERN as a partner, Dashwood is a co-investigator in a collaborative, multi-perspective case study project on Canadian mining companies in developing countries. This research was funded by SSHRC’s International Opportunities Fund (IOF). In the first phase of this project, Dashwood conducted research on a Canadian mining company and its CSR activities in Ghana.

Stefan Dolgert

Associate Professor, Political Science
Office: PLZ 345
905-688-5550 x3891
sdolgert@brocku.ca

Stefan Dolgert is a political theorist. He writes and teaches on democratic theory, the ethics of violence, critical animal studies, posthumanism, environmental politics and ancient Greek political philosophy. His primary interest relating to social justice concerns the “question of the animal” – how humans have historically constituted themselves in opposition to something called “animals” – and how this human/animal dichotomy has legitimated oppression in the form of racism, imperialism, sexism, ableism and speciesism.

He is currently working on three major projects: a manuscript on the rich non-anthropocentric tradition in ancient Greek thought, focusing on Homer, Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle; another manuscript, that critiques the sacrificial model of politics derived from juridical thought; and finally an edited volume that highlights the productive relationship between critical animal studies and disability studies.

Andrea Doucet

Professor, Sociology
Office: STH 410
905-688-5550 x3150
adoucet@brocku.ca

Andrea Doucet has published widely on themes of gender/work/care, fathering and mothering, masculinities, parental leave policies, embodiment, reflexivity, ‘responsible knowing’, and knowledge construction processes. Her book Do Men Mother? (2006, 2nd edition, 2018) was awarded the 2007 John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award from the Canadian Sociology Association. She is also co-author of two editions of the book Gender Relations in Canada: Intersectionalities and Social Change (2008, 2017) and a forthcoming edited collection on feminist epistemologies entitled “Lorraine Code: Thinking Ecologically, Thinking Responsibly. 

Andrea approaches her teaching and research from an eclectic transdisciplinary perspective and background. She has degrees in political science (social and political thought) and creative writing (York), international development studies (Carleton), and a PhD in social and political sciences (Cambridge University, funded as a Commonwealth Scholar). Her research on theories, practices, and ontologies of care has been influenced by her co-parenting of three daughters; her work on methodologies, epistemologies and knowing processes began thirty years ago when she spent nearly six years as a participatory research facilitator, working mainly for the United Nations Development Program in water supply and sanitation projects in Central and South America.

Andrea is currently conducting collaborative research with local community organizations on young motherhood, Black motherhood, feminist and Indigenous approaches to care and eldercare, and class and gender issues in parental leave policies. Her current writing is on non-representational narrative analysis, visual methodologies, family photographs, ecological thinking, and our epistemic responsibilities as researchers and knowers.

Hannah Dyer

Associate Professor, Child and Youth Studies
Office: CRN 346
905-688-5550 x4323
hdyer@brocku.ca

Dr. Hannah Dyer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child & Youth Studies and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. Her research employs interdisciplinary methods to investigate how sexuality, gender and nation-state become entangled in theories of child development. Drawing on queer theory and cultural studies, her work examines the affiliations between social belonging and the child’s psychological interiority.

She turns to children’s art and art about childhood to better understand how to repair justice and build hope in the aftermath of violence. Hannah’s forthcoming book, The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, explores how the aesthetic cultures of childhood can cause us to re-think what we know of gender, race and sexuality. While taking the child’s material vulnerabilities and pressing need for care into account, this work also draws from the humanities’ emphasis on aesthetics, fantasy and futurity. Hannah’s research interests include: Queer theory; child and youth studies; art/aesthetics; racism and racialization; gender and sexuality; cultural studies.

Ifeanyi Ezeonu
Professor, Sociology
Office: STH 424
905-688-5550 x4054
iezeonu@brocku.ca

Dr. Ezeonu received his B.Sc. (Honours) from the Anambra State University of Technology (now, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria), M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, England, M.A. from the University of Leeds, England and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He has published on issues of social and economic justice in Sub-Saharan Africa (with special focus on the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO) and the international politics of environmental protection.

Ifeanyi’s research interests include globalization and international development, gang violence, racialized crime, social construction of crime, transnational crime, environmental crime in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, and contemporary African Diaspora.

Margot Francis

Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies
Office: MCD 333
905-688-5550 x5381
mfrancis@brocku.ca

Margot Francis is an Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, cross appointed to the Department of Sociology. She is the author of Creative Subversions: Whiteness and Indigeneity in the National Imaginary (University of British Columbia Press, 2011) and has published in journals such as Native American and Indigenous Studies, Feral Feminisms, and Critical Sociology. Her research interests include: Indigenous and decolonializing perspectives on settler societies, community arts for Indigenous resurgence, alliances between Indigenous and anti-racist movements in sexual violence activism, queer artistic activism.

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).

Jennifer Good

Associate Professor, Communication, Popular Culture and Film
Office: SBH 342
905-688-5550 x3707
jgood@brocku.ca

Jennifer Good’s research and teaching interests sit at the intersections between the mediated communication, materialism and our relationship with the natural environment. She has published articles exploring the communication and framing of climate change, the role of the Internet in environmental communication/awareness and the relationship between television viewing and the environment. Good’s book Television and the Earth: Not a Love Story was published in 2013. Her current research includes two CRISS-funded projects: an environmental content analysis of prime-time television; interviews with advertisers and environmental activists about their use of digital media. She is also working on a book that explores environmental justice in the lifecycle of electronics. Good 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.

Julie Ham

Assistant Professor of Sociology
Office: STH 414
905-688-5550 x4369
jham@brocku.ca

Julie Ham’s recent research explores knowledge production and cultural production by migrants in Hong Kong through participatory and visual methodologies. Her research is grounded in academic-community collaborations that speak to priorities identified by migrant and minority communities, such as the dehumanization of domestic workers, harms produced by the anti-trafficking industry, the impact of social difference in sex work, the trajectory of migrant remittances, cultural production and dynamics that support or hinder social change for migrant communities. Her research on migration, labour, social difference and the criminology of mobility has been published in The British Journal of Criminology; Critical Social Policy; Culture, Health & Sexuality; Gender, Work & Organization; Sociology; Theoretical Criminology; and Work, Employment and Society. She was awarded the Radzinowicz Memorial Prize for 2014 by The British Journal of Criminology for her co-authored article with Sharon Pickering, ‘Hot pants at the border: Sorting sex work from trafficking’. She has published a monograph, Sex Work, Immigration and Social Difference (2017), and a co-edited volume The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration (2014) with Sharon Pickering.

For more information about her research, visit Mobile Methodologies and Migrant Knowledges at https://www.mmmk.ca/

Charlotte Henay

Assistant Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies
905-688-5550 x3466
chenay@brocku.ca

Charlotte Henay is a Bahamian diasporic performance artist, poet, pluridisciplinary scholar and Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies. She works with poetry, lyric and visual essays in writing about Black and Indigenous women’s voices as witness.  Henay’s deathwork sits with the bones as protocols for cultural reclamation and spiritual reparations, making Afro-Indigenous futurities in diaspora. Integral to this work are Black-Indigenous land relationships, where land and the archive are embodied. The substantive goal of this work is healing justice, and the design of alternate worlds in relational frameworks.

Charlotte’s work renders explicit in poetic form this process of talking with the dead and, through that, of confronting and ultimately transforming absences and silences in the archive. Unearthing silences and the missing spaces and times invites a layered and non-secular recognition of the sacred and interdependence of relations that could overturn rampant disaster capitalism.

Henay’s writing has been published in Canada and internationally, in literary magazines and academic journals, and her multidisciplinary work exhibited at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, conferences and galleries in Toronto, Canada.

Chelsea Jones

Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies
cjones@brocku.ca

Dr. Chelsea Temple Jones (pronouns: she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies. A queer, white settler spoonie, Dr. Jones holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from Ryerson and York Universities and an MA in Critical Disability Studies from York University. She completed a Mitacs postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Regina’s Vocally Oriented Investigations of Create Expression (VOICE) Lab—a studio space for disabled folx who communicate in various ways, and not always through speech. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Development Grant that continues her study of the ways in which ableist, colonial gestures of “giving voice” face resistance from young, disabled adults engaged in disability justice.

Dr. Jones’ qualitative research focuses on disabled children’s childhood studies and takes intellectual disability as a cultural phenomenon. Her work is deeply engaged in disabled, deaf, mad, and crip-informed arts-based research methods informed by her earlier position as a Research Associate at Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph. An award-winning teacher and journalist, Dr. Jones is a former Instructor of research methods courses at Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies and is the co-founder of the transdisciplinary podcast, “Podagogies: A Learning and Teaching Podcast.” She brings storytelling into all of her courses and works with students to create intellectual partnerships that value collaboration through a broad, ever-changing understanding of how we might engage in accessible knowledge production.

Anthony Kinik

Associate Professor, Communication, Popular Culture and Film
Office: SBH 335
905-688-5550 x6397
akinik@brocku.ca

Anthony Kinik is a film studies professor at Brock University whose areas of specialization include documentary film, experimental film, and Cinema & the City.  Together with his colleagues Steven Jacobs and Eva Hielscher, he is the co-editor of the recently released book The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars (AFI Film Readers, Routledge, 2019).

His essay “Errol Morris, The New York Times, and Op-Docs as Pop Docs,” will appear in Reclaiming Popular Documentary, eds. Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson (Indiana University Press, 2020).  He is currently working on a book on Sixties Montreal as a cinematic city.

Pascal Lupien

Associate Professor, Political Science
905-688-5550 x3478
plupien@brocku.ca

Pascal Lupien is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brock University. He is also a Fellow at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC, York University), an Associated Researcher with the Groupe de recherche en communication politique (GRCP, Université Laval) and co-coordinator of the Groupe de recherche Afriques-Amérique latine (GRAAL, University of Alberta). He holds a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Guelph, a Master’s in Information Studies (MIS) from the Université de Montréal, and a BA in Politics from McGill University.

Dr. Lupien’s research interests revolve around participatory democracy, social movements, political communication and technology, and the factors that enhance or diminish the capacity of marginalized communities to participate in politics. He currently leads a SSHRC-funded project entitled “Indigenous Women and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs): Supporting an Empowered and Resilient North-South Community”. This transnational multidisciplinary project draws on a community-based approach in order to ensure that the direction of the research is guided by Indigenous women. Working across four jurisdictions (Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Canada’s Yukon Territory), project participants seek to develop indigenized and gendered ICT solutions that will support Indigenous women’s efforts to engage in the public sphere, and to facilitate sharing of stories and strategies across settler-imposed borders. He is working with both academics and Indigenous community leaders in the four jurisdictions. Lupien’s previous SSHRC-funded project (2017-2019) examined the impact of ICTs such as social media on the capacity of Indigenous social movements to engage in politics in three Latin American countries.

Lupien’s book, Citizens’ Power in Latin America: Theory and Practice (SUNY Press, 2018), looks at how local communities use participatory democracy mechanisms to pursue collective social development goals. His research has also been published in journals such as Democratization; Citizenship Studies; Political Science Quarterly; Information, Communication and Society; Social Media + Society; Gender, Place and Culture; and Latin American Perspectives.  

Dr. Lupien’s teaching interests include the politics of Latin America, democracy and democratization, civil society and social movements, and comparative politics (particularly with respect to the Global South). He welcomes the opportunity to supervise graduate students in his areas of expertise.

Areas of specialization:

  • Comparative politics
  • Latin American politics
  • Indigenous politics (Andean region)
  • Participatory democracy
  • Social movements
  • Political communication
  • ICTs and social media

Voula Marinos

Professor, Child and Youth Studies
Office: CRN 341
905-688-5550 x3386
vmarinos@brocku.ca

Dr. Voula Marinos is an Associate Professor and holds a Ph.D in Criminology from the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto. Her interdisciplinary research is currently focused on three primary areas: diversion of youth and adults from the formal court process; mental health, intellectual disabilities, law and the courts; and plea bargaining and sentencing of youth and adults. She is a Member of the Canadian Centre for Lifespan Research at Brock University. She was part of the 3Rs Rights, Respect and Responsibility Research Team at Brock, committed to research on human rights for persons with intellectual disabilities.

Much of her work involves interviews with criminal justice professionals and court observations. She lectures widely to criminal justice professionals, law students, and community-based organizations about her research and criminal justice policy. Dr. Marinos teaches courses in the department relating to youth law (CHYS 3P39), young offenders and youth justice (CHYS 3P40), sentencing and punishment of young offenders (CHYS 4P39), and the Policies for Children and Youth, Canadian Perspectives (CHYS 3P27).

LIAM MIDZAIN-GOBIN

Assistant Professor, Political Science
Office: Plaza 353
905-688-5550 x353
lmidzaingobin@brocku.ca

Dr. Midzain-Gobin is a settler scholar whose research focuses on the production and continual remaking of settler coloniality, and Indigenous governance practices. His major research project studies the ways that settler colonial ordering is shaped and made possible by knowledge production, and contested by Indigenous ways of knowing.

Dr. Midzain-Gobin’s broader research interests are drawn from his background in critical international relations theory, and especially decolonial theory. Working as a settler, Dr. Midzain-Gobin seeks to employ community-engaged methods to support Indigenous self-determination in order to build a decolonized future. He also has active research projects on the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous housing in Niagara, and Indigenous energy utilities, and is interested in supervising students in any area of Indigenous politics, settler colonialism, decolonial theory, and international politics more broadly.

Shannon Moore

Professor, Child and Youth Studies
Office: CRN 337B
905-688-5550 x5396
smoore@brocku.ca

Shannon A. Moore is a Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. Dr. Moore holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies. She is a nationally registered clinical counsellor (since 2000) and a registered psychotherapist with the Ontario College of Psychotherapists (2017).She considers questions of health and wellbeing through the lens of community, society, and culture. Her recent research is focused on trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive pedagogy, service and practice. Dr. Moore is a qualitative researcher that engages social justice and transdisciplinarity.

Research Interests

Well-being and mental health of young people, families and community; trauma-informed and trauma sensitive policy, practice and pedagogy; university-community relationships; restorative Justice; Social Justice; transdisciplinarity; and qualitative methodologies.

Recent publications

  • Moore, S.A. (In Press). Transdisciplinarity. C. Orr & A. Braithwaite, Eds. In, Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies – Volume II.  Routledge/Taylor and Francis.
  • Roma, R., Tardif-Williams, C., Moore, S., & Pendry, P. (2023). My ‘Perfect’Dog: Undesired Dog Behaviours and Owners’ Coping Styles. Human-Animal Interactions, (2023).
  • Ciotti, S. & Moore, S.A. (2022) Children ‘at risk’: a critical content analysis exploring representations of childhood in Canadian media from the first wave to the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vulnerable Children and Youth Studies, DOI: 10.1080/17450128.2022.2136425
  • Pilato, K.A. , Law, M.P., Hay, J. A. Narushima, M. & Moore, S.A. (2022). Stress Testing the University Fall Break Policy: Understanding the Impact on Student Mental Health. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 52(1), 70–82. https://doi.org/10.47678/cjhe.v52i1.189453
  • Ciotti, S. & Moore,  S.A., Connolly, M. & Newmeyer, T. (2022). Super-Spreaders or Victims of Circumstance? Childhood in Canadian Media Reporting of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Critical Content Analysis. In Healthcare (Vol. 10, No. 1, p. 156). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.
  • Ciotti, S. & Moore, S.A. (2022) Children ‘at risk’: a critical content analysis exploring representations of childhood in Canadian media from the first wave to the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vulnerable Children and Youth Studies, DOI: 10.1080/17450128.2022.2136425
  • Pilato, K.A., Law, M.P. ,Narushima, M. , Moore, S.A. & Hay, J.A. (2021). The creation of a mental health policy in higher education. Educational Policy, 0895904821101561
  • Moore, S. A., & Ciotti, S. (2021). Praxis -poiesis: University -community relationship in an epoch of uncertainty and disruption. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Leadership Studies, 2 ( 4), 27 -51. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52547/johepal.2.4.27
  • Moore, S.A. & Duffin, K. (2020). On Root/Route: Engaging Nature as Therapeutic Partner Through Land Praxis in Residential Child Care Contexts. Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care, 19 (1), pp. 1-18. Available from https://www.celcis.org/files/8215/8254/5386/2020_Vol_19_No_1_Moore_S_On_Root_Route_Engaging_Nature_as_Therapeutic_Partner.pdf
  • Roma, R. , Tardif-Williams, C., Moore, S.A. & Bosacki, S. (2020). A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Dog-Handler-Client Interactions in Animal Assisted Activities for Children, Youth and Young Adults. Human-Animal Interactions Bulletin, 9 (2), pp. 62-91. (10% Contribution).
  • S.A. Moore (2020). Young People, Justice, and Children’s Rights In Canada: Critical Reflections At The Edge Of Abeyant Action. In T. Waldock (Ed.). The Status of Children in Canada: A Children’s Right’s Analysis, 2nd Edition, pp. 87-106, Canadian Scholars Press. See https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/A/A-Question-of-Commitment3

Scott Neufeld

Lecturer, Psychology Department
sneufeld@brocu.ca

Stigma, Substance Use, Housing and Homelessness, NIMBYism, Collective Identity, Social Representations, Community-Based Qualitative Research, Research Ethics

Broadly my research interests lie in how collective identities are represented and contested in the context of intergroup relations. I have explored this in the context of urban Indigenous community members’ negotiation of their diverse cultural identities and representations of colonial history in an Indigenous culture-focused school, in the narratives of exclusion that often typify community resistance to planned social housing or homeless encampments, and most recently in how people who use drugs are represented in anti-stigma campaigns across Canada and the United States.

Much of my research is community-based (i.e. community members are directly involved as collaborators in the research) and I primarily utilize qualitative research methods. A significant part of my work has also focused on research ethics from the perspective of heavily researched community members, for example in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood.

Trent Newmeyer

Director, Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies
Associate Professor, Sociology
Office: STH 419
905-688-5550 x5118
tnewmeyer@brocku.ca

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.

Shauna Pomerantz

Professor, Child and Youth Studies
Office: CRN 331
905-688-5550 x5371
spomerantz@brocku.ca

My research sits at the intersections of youth cultural studies, girlhood studies, and critical sociology. I theorize the material-discursive contexts and assemblages of young peoples’ lives using posthuman, post-structural, and feminist frameworks. Methodologically, I have conducted studies using ethnography, interviewing, and focus groups, and am currently engaging post qualitative inquiry. I have published chapters and articles on gender and success, girls and social media, youthful feminisms, girlhood studies, postfeminist contexts of education, dress codes, girls’ style, computer girls, skater girls, and femininities and masculinities in popular culture. I am author of Girls, Style, and School Identities: Dressing the Part (Palgrave, 2008), co-author, with Dawn Currie and Deirdre Kelly, of Girl Power: Girls Reinventing Girlhoods (Peter Lang, 2009), and co-author, with Rebecca Raby, of Smart Girls: Negotiating Academic Success in the Post-Feminist Era (University of California Press, 2017). My most recent research includes an immanent exploration of the film Eight Grade as an example of how to move past negative judgment of girls and the things they do, as well as a post qualitative inquiry with my daughter on the creative, educational, and generative potential of the social media app, TikTok.

I teach in the areas of cultural theory, sociology of childhood, popular culture, social justice, and qualitative research methodologies. When not working, I enjoy listening to records, studying music trivia, watching great shows and movies (I especially love coming of age narratives), exercising, and hanging out with my family.

Rebecca Raby

Professor, Child and Youth Studies
Office: CRN 340
905-688-5550 x3172
rraby@brocku.ca

Trained as a sociologist, I draw primarily on critical, feminist, post-structural, and post-humanist theorizing to study social justice in childhood and youth. My research and teaching investigate discrimination against young people, especially as age intersects with gender, race, class and sexual orientation; sociology of education, with a focus on school disciplinary and surveillance practices as well as sex education; constructions of childhood and adolescence, particularly how they are experienced by children and adolescents themselves; theories of rebellion, resistance and contestation among adolescents/youth; and children and youth as active participants in broader society.

In addition to numerous articles, my publications include Smart Girls: Success, School and the Myth of Post-Feminism (Pomeratnz & Raby, 2017, University of California Press) and School Rules: Discipline, Obedience and Elusive Democracy (2012, UTP). I also co-edited of the textbook Power and Everyday Practices (Brock, Martin, Raby & Thomas, 2019, UTP), which draws on Marxist and Foucauldian thinking in order to complicate everyday activities, and The Sociology of Childhood and Youth in Canada (Chen, Raby & Albanese, 2018, CSPI). Recent and current research projects focus on children’s experiences at the beginning of the pandemic; young people’s climate activism; very first part-time jobs; and children’s experiences of homelessness. I am particularly interested in working with students who wish to bring a social justice lens to studying facets of childhood and youth.

Mary-Beth Raddon

Associate Professor, Sociology
Office: STH 401
905-688-5550 x3460
mraddon@brocku.ca

Mary-Beth Raddon researches topics related to money and finance from the vantage points of social history, political economy and culture. She is especially interested in economic institutions, such as inheritance, charity, philanthropy, social welfare, households and cooperatives, whose primary logic is not market exchange. She has written a book on community currencies, which explores how new local exchange networks expose existing gendered patterns of reciprocity, work and shopping. Mary-Beth also studies civic participation, social activism, community-based research and action research. These interests dovetail with her work in service-learning, a method of teaching that combines formal learning with community engagement. Areas of supervision include economic sociology, critical pedagogy and qualitative research methods.

Karen-Louise Smith

Assistant Professor, Communications, Popular Culture
Office: SBH 316
905-688-5550 x6497
karen.louise.smith@brocku.ca

Dr. Smith’s research explores the tensions between openness, privacy, and participation in technologically mediated culture. Some of Dr. Smith’s research is conducted in collaboration with Mozilla, a global non-profit committed to the open web. From 2013-2015, Dr. Smith conducted collaborative research with Mozilla to build the Hive Toronto digital literacy network. In 2017, Dr. Smith was awarded a Mozilla Research Grant for a project titled Add-ons for Privacy: Open Source Advocacy Tactics for Internet Health. Dr. Smith is also currently a collaborator on The eQuality Project, a SSHRC funded research collaboration to examine digital economy issues such as privacy and cyberbullying that impact youth.

Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz

Assistant Professor, Sociology
gtanyildiz@brocku.ca

Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz’s research focuses on the relationship between embodied social relations, formations, and subjectivities within contemporary capitalism through anti-racist, feminist, queer, and marxist social theories. His research demonstrates that the aporias frequently encountered in contemporary critical theories lay in the antinomies of classical sociology. In so doing, he emphasizes the necessity for sociological analyses that are commensurate to the social and political problems of our time.

Gökbörü’s teaching interests are in the areas of political economy of gender, work, and social policy; sociology of genders, sexualities, and families; race and racialization; classical and contemporary social theories; history of sociological analysis; phenomenological sociology; global social movements; and urban sociology.

He has published on social movements; refugees and state formation; feminist urban theory; and public spaces and virtual spaces. He co-edited a special issue of Society and Space on planetary urbanization. His most recent co-edited book volume on social reproduction and feminist urban theory is currently under review.

Gökbörü is enthusiastic about working with graduate students who are interested in researching different aspects of contemporary social and political problems through a variety of theoretical perspectives (including, but not limited to, Marxism’s, feminisms, anti-racism, intersectionality, queer theories, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis) and methodological approaches (including, but not limited to, autoethnography, activist methodologies, institutional ethnography, and ethnomethodology).

Lyn Trudeau

Lecturer, Women’s and Gender Studies/Sociology
Office: MC D328
905-688-5550 x3117
ltrudeau@brocku.ca

Lyn Trudeau

Lyn Trudeau is from Sagamok Anishinawbek First Nation, Eagle Clan. She is cross-appointed with Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology, and affiliate of Social Justice and Equity Studies. Lyn’s research is through a decolonial lens and feels it is important to honour her cultural background; therefore, embeds Indigenous knowledge and ways of being in her classrooms and research endeavours. Lyn is also an artistic scholar who engages creative expression, visual presence, and cultural representation within her works.

Research: Indigenous methodologies, Arts-based research, storytelling, sociocultural contexts, decolonization.

Ebru Ustundag

Associate Professor, Geography
Office: MC C314
905-688-5550 x4417
eustundag@brocku.ca

Ebru Ustundag is an Associate Professor of Geography at Brock University. Ebru got her PhD from York U and she has her MSc in Urban Planning and Bsc in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University, Ankara Turkey. Her recent research project titled “Witnessing Social Citizenship: Microgeographies of street level sex workers in St. Catharines” where she collaborates with various local community organizations. Her areas of research are: citizenship studies, feminist geographies, health geographies, geographies of inequalities and exclusion, and theories of social justice.

Students 2023

Group of attendees at Niagara Social Justice Forum 2023.

Niagara Social Justice Forum 2023

SJES5P03 Research Methods Class 2023.

SJES5P03 Research Methods Class 2023

SJES students, graduate students at the 2023 Starlight Gala.

SJES Students, Graduate Students Starlight Gala 2023

SJES Students, The Body Ableism, and Disability Justice class 2023.

SJES Students, The Body Ableism, and Disability Justice Class 2023