Pierson Browne
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)
Laura Connoy

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.
Katie Cook

Dissertation/ Research area
Youth crime, Social networks, Female delinquency
Brittany Etmanski

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.
Jamal Hejazi
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.
Cathlene Hillier
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
Michael Holland
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.
Celia Huang

Dissertation/ Research area
Sociology of Home, Chinese Immigrants, Interpretive Sociology, Social Statistics
Karolina Korsak
Dissertation/ Research area
Interpretive Sociology, Heritage, Museums, Culture, Art
Pat Lalonde

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)
Carlie L Leroux
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
Rod Missaghian

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.
Manjit Pabla

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..
Rowland Keshena Robinson
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.
Kanika Samuels
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 Schram
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.
Krystle Shore
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.
Damian Sycz
Dissertation/ Research area
Policing, Policing Strategies, HR management, organizational theory, research methods.
Christine Wojciechowski

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.