As the global population continues to expand and the the earth rapidly urbanizes, we need to get a better understanding of how to live and thrive alongside people who are strangers to us. My main research interest is in social solidarity, especially the ways that we do or don't demonstrate solidarity with one another when we're in places that are populated mostly by strangers. I bring this overarching interest in solidarity to SSHRC-funded projects on sociability and incivility in urban public space, to studies of neighbourhood change and everyday experiences of mobility, to research on migrant workers in rural communities, and to thinking in new ways about how various kinds of social differences might be destigmatized.
Experience
2018–present
Associate professor, University of Guelph
2013–2018
Assistant professor, University of Guelph
2010–2013
Assistant professor , Acadia University
Education
2010
York University , PhD Sociology
1999
National University of Ireland, Cork, MA Sociology
Publications
2020
A Shared Everyday Ethic of Public Sociability: Outdoor Public Ice Rinks as Spaces for Encounter (co-authored with S. Liinamaa, A. Dakin, S. Meligrana & M.Xu, Urban Planning
2020
Urban interaction ritual: Strangership, civil inattention and everyday incivilities in public space, Pragmatics
2020
Housing Stigmatization: A General Theory, Social Inclusion
2019
Everyday Incivility and the Urban Interaction Order: Theorizing Moral Affordances in Ritualized Interaction, Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
2018
Territorial Stigmatization and Territorial Destigmatization: A Cultural Sociology of Symbolic Strategy in Parkdale's (Toronto) Gentrification, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
2017
Mundane Mutualities: Solidarity & Strangership in Everyday Urban Life, Place, Diversity, Solidarity (edited by Oosterlynck, S., M. Loopmans & N. Schuermans)
2017
The Social Quarantining of Migrant Labour: Everyday Effects of Temporary Foreign Worker Regulation in Canada (co-authored with Saara Liinamaa), Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Grants and Contracts
2018
Sociable Cities
Role:
Principal Investigator
Funding Source:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
2012
Researching Incivilities in Everyday Life
Role:
Principal Investigator
Funding Source:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada