Our People - Graduate students

Dissertation/Research area

Patrick's dissertation research examines frontline social interactions between border services officers (BSOs) and members of various travelling publics. (Funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship)

Dissertation/Research area

Laura’s dissertation research focuses on governance, mobility politics, asylum, and social justice. Specifically, she critically examines the irregularization of refugee claimants in Toronto’s everyday spaces and places, and how such processes are negotiated and contested.

Dissertation/ Research area

Youth crime, Social networks, Female delinquency

Interests: Sociology of (higher) education; School-to-Work transitions; Quantitative and mixed methods; Social and public policy; Social stratification and inequality.

Dissertation Topic Description: Brittany’s doctoral research examines the employment pathways of recent Canadian PhD graduates in the social sciences through a national, institutional, and individual-level approach. In particular, it aims to identify the specific industry-related pathways graduates secure, as most research has focused extensively on obtaining academic employment. As a growing number of graduates obtain non-academic employment, it is important to inform current PhD students of viable career options they can pursue upon graduation, and to aid in removing the stigma associated with obtaining an industry career.

Dissertation Topic

Jamal's doctoral research examines topics of sport regulation and policy.

Research area

Sport Regulation, Policy, Sport and Society, Health and Safety, Sociology of Sport, Law and Society, Governance, Research Methods.

Dissertation Topic

Cathlene's doctoral research examines macro- and micro- understandings of parent engagement and its relationship to children's literacy achievement.  Funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.

Research area

Sociology of Education, Sociology of the Family & Childhood, Inequality, Organizations, Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Dissertation Topic

Michael's research examines the relationship between low socio-economic status (SES) of families and children's literacy.

Research area - Socciology of education; inequality; economic sociology; comparative and mixed methods.

Dissertation/ Research area

Sociology of Home, Chinese Immigrants, Interpretive Sociology, Social Statistics

Dissertation/ Research area

Interpretive Sociology, Heritage, Museums, Culture, Art

Dissertation/Research area

Patrick's dissertation research examines frontline social interactions between border services officers (BSOs) and members of various travelling publics. (Funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship)

Dissertation Topic

Carlie's doctoral research examines the mother-child program in relation to larger trends in penal governance, particularly the shift from penal welfare to neoliberal political rationalities

​Research area

penal regimes, mother-child, empowerment, neoliberalism, gendered discipline 

Dissertation/ Research area

Drawing on a qualitative examination of senior high school students enrolled in an after-school enrichment program in the inner-city, Rod's research examines how they make choices about their educational careers and the experiences of those students who decide to transition into postsecondary.

Research area - Sociology of education; higher education marketing; work and occupations.

Dissertation/Research area

Manjit's research focuses on how the South Asian gang phenomenon in Western Canada has been problematized and governed by authorities and how various stakeholders (government and non-government actors) problematize risk..

Dissertation Topic

Currently Rowland’s doctoral research draws upon the techniques of autoethnography and border thinking/border gnosis to examine the formation of First Nations & Native American identity within the biopolitical, affective, juridical and philosophical imaginings of the United States & Canada through his own lived experiences as a diasporic, urban and liminaly enrolled Indigenous person. Rowland’s work situates this identity formation within the structures of settler colonialism, in particular the logic of elimination, and examines how the official means by which it takes place effects a “biogenic extension of frontier homicide.” He also examines how self-determined and decolonial notions of identity within contemporary Indigenous community both mesh with and exist beyond official categorization, as well as the processes of new Indigenous identity formation, in particular within the urban setting.

Research area

Critical Indigenous Studies; Settler Colonial Studies; Coloniality & Modernity; Decoloniality & Decolonial Theory; Phenomenology; Genealogical Critique; Indigenous Identity; Politics of Refusal; Grounded Normativity; Biopower & Biopolitics; Ideology & Hegemony; Affect Studies & Affect Theory; Critique of Political Ontology; Historical Materialism.

Dissertation Topic

Kanika's doctoral research will explore the factors that contribute to the formation of youth perceptions of social injustice and how these perceptions of injustice impact criminal behavior and other life outcomes.

Research area

Juvenile Delinquency, Policing, Social Inequality, Criminal Justice Process 

Brian's dissertation research looks at the intersection between surveillance and new media. Specifically, he is interested in how software has come to structure identity politics and activism both online and off.  

Dissertation Topic

Krystle's dissertation research explores the obscuring of protective and security-based surveillance practices and how these practices relate to broader trends in power and governance. She is specifically examining the deployment of wearable location tracking technology by police in order to track people who have cognitive impairments.

Research area

Krystle's research interests broadly concern the fields of policing and surveillance, and more specifically include critically examining the use of police surveillance technologies (e.g., police body-worn cameras, wearable location tracking devices). Krystle is also interested in the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic dimensions of various trends within academia, such as the contemporary push for research collaboration and knowledge mobilization.

Dissertation/ Research area

Policing, Policing Strategies, HR management, organizational theory, research methods.

Dissertation/ Research area

Policing, police discretion and decision-making, policing strategies, homicide studies, socio-legal responses to crime, research methods. Funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.