Research

Trauma, leisure, and the pursuit of healing 

One focus of our research is a commitment to understanding how trauma shapes—and is shaped by—our everyday lives, particularly through the lens of leisure. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks from leisure studies, psychology, and critical theory, our work explores the powerful intersection of trauma, healing, health, and leisure. 

Trauma is not only something that happens to us, but something that transforms us from within. It reshapes how we think, behave, connect, and engage with the world - including how we experience leisure. In response, our research investigates how leisure - when freely chosen and situated in restorative environments - can act as a profound pathway to healing. 

We explore how leisure-based practices like yoga, meditation, and breathwork support trauma recovery in intentionally designed, communal spaces. Using qualitative methods including participant observation and in-depth interviews, this research captures both the personal and collective dimensions of healing. It asks how individuals interpret their healing journeys, how restorative environments shape that process, and what these insights can offer to broader conversations around trauma-informed care. 

This body of work is motivated by the urgent need to respond to a growing trauma crisis and a rising interest in holistic wellness. By examining leisure not just as recreation, but as a transformative tool for resilience, the research challenges traditional notions of health and healing. It invites a reimagining of wellness practices that centre agency, belonging, and cultural relevance. 

Ultimately, this research contributes to academic, policy, and public understandings of how leisure-based interventions can support human flourishing, and how healing can be cultivated not just individually, but collectively. 

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Digital intimacies, techno-social harms, and gender equity online 

This research theme explores how digital technologies—particularly geosocial networking applications (GSNAs) like Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr—are transforming the ways people connect, form relationships, and experience intimacy. At the same time, it critically examines how these platforms can reinforce gendered power imbalances, reproduce harm, and shape sociosexual cultures in uneven and often inequitable ways. 

Framed by feminist, intersectional, and queer theoretical approaches, my work interrogates the social, emotional, and technological dimensions of dating and sexual interaction in digital spaces. It explores how GSNAs influence identity formation, gender relations, public and private boundaries, and overall well-being, especially for users navigating multiple systems of oppression. 

This line of research addresses both possibility and precarity: the liberating potential of technology to foster connection, pleasure, and self-discovery, as well as its role in enabling harassment, violence, and surveillance. Through qualitative methods—such as interviews, app walkthroughs, and collaborative partnerships with community organizations—my work also engages in knowledge mobilization, co-creating practical tools to enhance safety, media literacy, and equitable access to digital intimacy. 

Ultimately, this research contributes to broader conversations about digital citizenship, gender justice, and the urgent need to design and govern digital platforms with equity, safety, and care at the center. 

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Community, gender, and the social dimensions of health 

This stream of research examines how leisure, social connection, and community engagement shape women’s health and well-being within broader cultural and structural contexts. Moving beyond individualistic and biomedical models of health, our work explores how gendered ideologies—such as motherhood, familism, and pronatalism—influence women’s experiences of health and self. 

Through studies on community gardens and online social networks for mothers, our group investigates how everyday practices and digital platforms can foster social capital, reduce isolation, and promote a sense of belonging. This includes examining how online communities support mothers in navigating the demands of caregiving while offering space for connection, identity affirmation, and empowerment. 

Grounded in a feminist, social justice-oriented framework, this research positions leisure as more than recreation—it is a vehicle for resistance, empowerment, and well-being. Our work reveals how leisure experiences can both reproduce and challenge dominant gender ideologies, and how women mobilize these experiences to reclaim agency and redefine health on their own terms. 

Ultimately, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how community-based and digital spaces serve as critical infrastructures for gendered health and civic well-being, and how centring women’s voices can reimagine what it means to live well. 

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Women’s health, technology, and justice-centered well-being 

This research explores the intersections of health, technology, leisure, and social justice, with a particular focus on how women define and experience well-being in ways that are often overlooked by traditional medical models. Rooted in feminist and qualitative inquiry, this work centers women's voices and lived experiences to challenge dominant narratives that reduce health to physical symptoms or biomedical solutions. 

Across topics such as menopause, infertility, cancer, pregnancy, motherhood, and sport, our research has revealed how women conceptualize health holistically, emphasizing the importance of leisure, social connection, self-care, and community as integral to well-being. These insights call attention to the need for more inclusive, relational, and socially attuned understandings of health. 

As digital technologies increasingly shape the contours of everyday life, our team's more recent work investigates how technology mediates health, identity, and access to care—from women’s consumption of sexually explicit media to the role of digital platforms in shaping gendered health norms. This line of inquiry highlights both the promises and the perils of technology, examining how it can reproduce power imbalances or, alternatively, serve as a tool for empowerment, knowledge-sharing, and connection. 

Collectively, this research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that advocates for equity-oriented, person-centered approaches to health and well-being, particularly for women and gender-diverse populations navigating complex social realities. 

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Gender, sexuality, and embodied power in leisure and digital life 

Our research also explores how gender and sexuality are expressed, contested, and reclaimed through leisure and digital practices. Grounded in feminist and critical theory, this work investigates the ways women and gender-diverse individuals navigate systems of power—often through intentional acts of pleasure, resistance, and self-definition. 

Our team focuses on how leisure spaces, whether physical or digital, function as sites of both constraint and possibility. From sport and subculture to online platforms and sexually explicit material (pornography, erotica), this research examines how individuals use these spaces to perform identity, negotiate social norms, and cultivate agency. This includes how sexuality operates as a form of embodied capital, how pleasure can be politicized, and how digital technologies shape contemporary understandings of intimacy, connection, and empowerment. 

By bridging scholarship across leisure studies, gender studies, media, and health, our work reveals how everyday practices—often dismissed as trivial or private—are central to the production of cultural meaning and social change.

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