Marc Lafrance

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. I did my graduate work at the University of Oxford, where I earned an M.St. and a D.Phil. in French Cultural Studies. My work was supported by a Commonwealth Scholarship, a Ricard Foundation Student Bursary, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship and studentships at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis in London and the École normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm in Paris. Shortly thereafter, I was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in order to carry out a two-year project at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University .

Since joining the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, I have maintained an active research profile funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institute of Health Research. In addition, I have been awarded an Associate Visiting Research Fellowship at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, an Associate Fellowship at Wadham College at the University of Oxford, a Visiting Fellowship at the GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, and a Research Fellowship in Media and Communications Studies at Örebro University.

Drawing on my background in the social sciences and the humanities, I seek to move beyond common-sense assumptions about the world in which we live in order to better understand its complexities in both individual and collective terms. To do so, I take a critical approach to two key objects of enquiry— mass media representations and contemporary medical practices—and explore how they are bound up with phenomena such as gender, sexuality, race and class; body image and body modification; identity and lived experience; and human vulnerability across the life-course. I conduct empirical research grounded in quantitative and qualitative methods as well as more theoretical research informed by phenomenological, poststructural and psychoanalytic perspectives. I strive to conduct balanced and even-handed research and reject ideologically-driven approaches to scholarship.

I am currently working on a variety of projects relating to my two key objects of enquiry. With respect to the mass media, I am examining men, masculinity and intimacy in popular music; representations of violence against men in music videos; and the rise of extreme men’s rights activism. With respect to contemporary medicine, I am exploring the relationship between subjectivity and embodiment in the context of reconstructive surgery; the psychosocial significance of the skin; and the sociocultural regulation of the body’s senses. I work in both English and French and collaborate with researchers in Canada, England, France, Norway and Sweden.