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Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Guelph

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

Professional Memberships

  • Canadian Sociological Association
  • International Sociological Association
  • Canadian Network for Critical Sociology