Jessica Fields

Jessica Fields is Professor of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Professor of Sociology in the University of Toronto tri-campus graduate faculty. She is the author of Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (Rutgers University Press), which received the 2009 ASA Race, Class, and Gender Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award. With Laura Mamo, Nancy Lesko, and Jen Gilbert, she leads The Beyond Bullying Project, a community-based storytelling project that aims to understand and interrupt ordinary hostility in high schools to LGBTQ sexualities (funded by the Ford Foundation). Fields is writing her second book, Problems We Pose: Feeling Differently about Qualitative Research (University of Minnesota Press), in which she explores emotion as an opportunity to reimagine power and knowledge production in the researcher/researched relationship and as a source of insight (not as an obstacle to understanding) into social categories of difference, including race, gender, and sexuality. Her work appears in journals including Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Sex Education, Sexualities, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, and Social Problems.