With a diverse research portfolio in sociology of health and medicine, my research program is integrally linked to other substantive areas like sociology of gender and sexualities, mental health, families, education, and science and technology studies.
Current and Ongoing Research
1) COVID-19 Pandemic and COVID-19 Vaccinations — An investigation into public opinion, health behaviours, risk and safety behaviours.
Based on in-depth interviews, this research investigates British Columbians’ concerns, opinions, and attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccinations and public health initiatives, and what contributes to these beliefs. This project aims to uncover what information people have, what they do with that information, and how it influences their attitudes towards vaccination (their health information practices). From those insights, we reveal the relationships between people’s views of personal and public safety, their attitudes towards vaccination, their behaviours during this pandemic, and the daily stressors and mental health needs that might lead them to draw on misinformation or adopt risky behaviours.
2) The HPV Vaccine — Parental Responsibility, Adolescent Girls’ Subjectivities, and Sex Education
This research problematizes responsibility and the persistent tensions that accompanying vaccines, sexual health, and sex-education in contemporary society. I investigate the everyday micro-level of parents, teachers, and adolescent girls, with macro-politics of biomedicine, good parenting, and progressive sex-ed to understand how vaccine politics and sex-education i) manage and generate surprising forms of inequality, and ii) relate to girls’ development of their own subjectivities. I argue that while parents and teachers work to be responsible to girls’ health and sexual health, their actions and may not support adolescents in ways they imagined.
“Beyond the responsibility binary: analysing maternal responsibility in the human papillomavirus vaccination decision” (Sociology of Health and Illness, 2019).
3) Sexual Health, Sexual Experiences, and Sexual Violence
Drawing on data from a 60-day diary tool and surgery, this collaborative research project examining undergraduate students’ sexual experiences, sexual harassment, and mental health on university campuses.
Sexual health and violence on campus is a growing concern, and a key area for future research. I plan extend this research to investigate how youth-based formal and informal sexual health education and post-secondary sexual experiences are connected -- contexts that are commonly studied in isolation. My goal is to understand how health knowledge operates over key life course transitions by investigating the ways in which students’ prior youth-based sex-education relates to their post-secondary sexual experiences -- whether risky, safe, pleasurable, dangerous, wanted, or unwanted.
4) The Dynamics of Knowledge Production, Interdisciplinary, and Philosophy of Science
In addition to my research in sociology of health, medicine, and sexuality, I also have active research agenda in social and sociological theory, knowledge politics, philosophy of science.
“Towards a Critical Realist Epistemology?” (Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 2020) is a co-authored manuscript investigating the ongoing conversation about critical epistemologies and ontologies. When critical realists consider epistemology they typically start from “epistemological relativism.” We find this position necessary, but we also find it insufficient because it lacks a critique of the highly unequal social relations among observers themselves—relations that shape the very production of knowledge. While it is indeed the case that all knowledge is fallible, it is also the case that all knowledge is positioned, with a particular standpoint. What is more, the social power relations between standpoints organize the production of truth in ways that produce systematic distortions. In this paper, we propose a critical realist social epistemology. We introduce feminist standpoint theory and postcolonial theory as our suggested interventions into critical realism and we use two case studies of existing work to highlight i) the social production of truth and the real, and ii) what is at stake for radicalizing epistemology in critical realism. In so doing, our paper emphasizes the epistemic complexities that continuously shape ontology, a commitment to subaltern voices or experiences, and a thorough interrogation of the relations between positions of knowledge production.
“Erasing the Social From Social Science: The Intellectual Costs Of Boundary-Work And The Canadian Institute Of Health Research” (Canadian Journal of Sociology, 2014), examines the role of health-research funding structures in legitimizing and/or delimiting what counts as “good” social science health research, and reveals the erasure of feminist praxis, critical research strategies, and creative scholarship. My interest in this topic continues, and I am currently co-authoring an empirical piece on the “undone” and “rearranged” science that occurs within Canadian health research, tracking scholars’ project trajectories alongside Canadian health funding policy changes.
"Towards a New Normal: Emergent Elites and Feminist Scholarship,” written as part of an invited ASA author-meets-critic dialogue with Neil Gross, Eleanor Townsley, and Peter Baehr on Stephen Turner’s new book American Sociology: From Pre-disciplinary to Post-Normal. This paper expands Turner’s conversation about the contributions of feminist sociology. I offer this critique to function as an entry point through which to contemplate what elite sociology is, and how it relates to feminist sociology. I argue that Turner under-explores the contributions of feminist sociology by reducing its contributions to advocacy-based scholarship. By placing feminist sociology in opposition to elite sociology, he simplifies the important discussion of elite sociology, and loses sight of feminist sociology’s theoretical and methodological strengths.
Another co-authored theoretical piece critiques realist approaches that not only ignore the knowledge producer, but that also, in an ontic fallacy, reduce epistemology to questions of ontology.
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