Department of Sociology

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14078/13

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The murky circumstances of consent in Canada: a commentary on R. v Kirkpatrick
(2025) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Zidenberg, Alexandra M.; Varsanyi, Stephanie; Macaulay, Kaelyn; Sanabria, Sara
The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled on R. v Kirkpatrick, a case that raises many complex questions regarding consent and sexual violence in Canada. Despite the complainant stating that she would only have sexual intercourse with Ross Kirkpatrick with a condom, Kirkpatrick chose not to wear one, and he was charged with sexual assault. While at trial, it was found that the complainant consented to the sexual activity, and the BC Court of Appeal subsequently disagreed with that finding. Ultimately, the Supreme Court of Canada held that, when both parties agree to use a condom, the removal of the condom by one party is not consensual and constitutes sexual assault. In this commentary, we discuss how this case highlights the murky circumstances of consent in Canada, with particular attention to the growing phenomenon of “stealthing.” We lay out the key jurisprudence leading up to Kirkpatrick—namely, R. v Hutchinson and R. v Mabior. Then, we outline the state of the framework on consent in Canada, and we critique the legal tests for vitiating consent through fraud. We conclude that the definition of sexual activity to which an individual consents must consider essential conditions such as condom use.
Lateral gender-based violence in 2SLGBTQ+ communities: the stifling of queer joy through intersectional oppression, “pitiful” sexuality education, and media (mis)representation
(2025) Wright, JJ (Jessica)
There is a gap in the field of gender-based violence concerning lateral violence within 2SLGBTQ+ communities. This paper helps fill that gap by offering participants’ narratives from The Queer Sexual Joy Project, which engaged 100 2SLGBTQ+ youth from Canada and the US, ages 18–35, in focus groups, participatory visual arts-based research, one-on-one interviews, and surveys. The study provides insight into how lateral violence is fueled and expressed through overlapping and intersecting systems of oppression, including fatphobia, transphobia, sexism and misogyny, racism, and ableism. Participants’ experiences also highlighted that while lateral violence reduces the potentialities of queer sexual joy, this violence is catalyzed and reproduced through troubling depictions of 2SLGBTQ+ communities in popular media and sexuality education. The paper calls for further research on lateral violence and for increased and diverse representation of 2SLGBTQ+ communities in media and education to help address the disproportionately high rates of gender-based violence in these communities.
Introduction to the special issue "Mobilising queer joy: establishing queer joy studies"
(2025) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Burkholder, Casey
Our introduction to the special issue “Mobilising Queer Joy” reflects an urgent need for queer joy studies amidst a sociopolitical climate that feels increasingly ruinous. We reject the ‘joy deficit’ in sociological research that fixates on homogenous, misery-filled visions of 2SLGBTQIA+ existence, and which is severed from the profound beauty of queer love, queer and trans joy, gender euphoria, and the strength and depth of 2SLGBTQIA+ community care and chosen families. In addition to introducing the six articles in the special issue from authors in Canada, the Philippines, Australia, and the US, we aim to establish queer joy studies by articulating the affective power of queer joy for collective resistance and social transformation. Queer joy is more than a kitschy slogan on a tote bag or splashed on the side of a big bank’s Pride float; it is a collective experience that allows us to feel more alive and connected to our personal capacities and power. The queer joy we are interested in is dangerous to empire and colonial powers. It does not deny the relationship with ambivalence, rage, and grief, and instead mobilises these affects to confront injustices in our existing social order. Some of the questions we ask include: How does queer joy act as world-making and dream mapping of new, more sustainable futures? How might we further theorize and mobilise queer joy as a disruption to settler colonial, carceral logics? How might the transformative power of queer joy be amplified to fragment and challenge the rise of fascism and populism that seeks to exterminate it?
Un-learning and re-learning: reflections on relationality, urban berry foraging, and settler research uncertainties
(2024) Overend, Alissa; Rai, Ronak
In this reflexive piece, the authors consider the unexpected lessons learned while undertaking a collaborative research project with their home institution’s Indigenous Learning Centre on urban berry foraging. The faculty member questions the ethics of settlers undertaking this work, even if in collaboration with an Indigenous community, alongside the promises of this work to critical food studies. The practice of urban foraging is understood as a wider metaphor for Indigenous worldview, and for different ways of being and relating. The student’s reflections weave together themes of learning outside the classroom, with family and community, and the holistic aspects of doing research.
The role of cultural supports for Indigenous students: spaces for and impediments to decolonizing education
(2024) Milne, Emily; Wotherspoon, Terry
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) final report documents the history of residential schools while outlining responsibilities for schools to advance reconciliation. Schools have undertaken initiatives to affirm Indigenous perspectives and support Indigenous students, however progress toward decolonization remains limited. To support such initiatives, research has revealed the significance of having self-identified Indigenous peoples working at schools. Informed by critical sociology of education analysis and critical theories of settler colonialism and decolonization, we examine perspectives of 201 students, parents, and teachers working with self-identified Indigenous school staff members in Alberta, Canada, to explore spaces for as well as impediments to decolonization in school reforms and practices. Our findings reinforce research demonstrating the positive impact that interactions with self-identified Indigenous school staff can have for students, teachers, and parents. We also observe contradictions imposed by institutional practices that hinder progress towards reconciliation and decolonization.
Civil service organization as a political determinant of health: analyzing relationships between merit-based hiring, corruption, and population health
(2024) Patterson, Andrew C.
A growing literature finds that the way governments are organized can impact the societies they serve in important ways. The same is apparent with respect to civil service organizations. Numerous studies show that the recruitment of civil servants based on their credentials rather than on nepotism or patronage reduces corruption in government. Political corruption in turn appears to harm population health. Up to this time, however, civil service organization is not a recognized determinant of health and is little discussed outside of political science disciplines. To provoke a broader conversation on this subject, the following study proposes that meritocratic recruitment of civil servants improves population health. To test this proposition, a series of regression models examines comparative data for 118 countries. Consistent with study hypotheses, meritocratic recruitment of civil servants corresponds longitudinally with both lower rates of corruption and lower rates of infant mortality. Results are similar after robustness checks. Findings with regard to life expectancy are more mixed. However, additional tests suggest meritocratic recruitment contributes to life expectancy over a longer span of time. Findings also offer more support for a direct pathway from meritocratic recruitment to population health rather than via changes in corruption levels per se, although this may depend on a country's level of economic development. Overall, this study offers first evidence that civil service organization, particularly the recruitment of civil servants based on the merits of their applications rather than on whom they happen to know in government, is a positive determinant of health. More research in this area is needed.
Atmosphere and inspiration in the Soviet Gulag
(2023) Stepnisky, Jeffrey
In this essay I use Peter Sloterdijk's and Gernot Böhme's theories of atmosphere to describe the production of atmospheres in the Soviet Gulag. I rely on eight memoirs written by Gulag prisoners. I develop the idea that atmospheres are formed out of co-inspirational practices between persons and the objects in their world. The Gulag is an extreme social situation in which these inspirational practices are manipulated and/or destroyed. Nevertheless, I claim that prisoners find opportunities to develop atmospheres that shelter, protect, and uplift them. I describe the practices through which these atmospheres are created and emphasize their relationship to an inspirational approach to social psychological theories of selfhood and social life.
Documenting and activating educational leadership and authentic teaching
(2024) Symbaluk, Diane; Andrews, David M.; Potter, Tiffany; Zecevic, Aleksandra
This essay describes two integrated projects initiated by the 2020 3M National Teaching Fellowship Award (NTF) cohort on educational leadership and the role of authenticity among exemplary teachers, as presented at STLHE 2022. A thematic analysis of 3M NTF award-winning dossiers identified six prevalent traits characteristic of educational leaders: innovation, persistence, responsiveness, reflectiveness, curiosity, and positive opportunism. The analysis also revealed aspects of educational leadership in practice, including being committed to a cause, being action-oriented, being community-engaged, being multi-disciplinary, building bridges, freely sharing, trailblazing, and using applied methods. Educational leaders’ relationships with others tended to foreground elements of collaboration, empowerment, support, and mentorship, and their actions had an impact beyond their own classrooms or institutions. In the second project, qualitative interviews with cohort members articulated ways in which authentic teaching is expressed by educational leaders. The actions of authentic teachers were viewed as influential and inspiring, and based on their actions authentic teachers tended to be recognized as instruments of change. These results were shared in an interactive workshop at STHLE 2022, which discussed how educational leadership is currently framed in higher education, and guided participants in self-reflection as educators and leaders to formulate calls to action involving educational leadership and authentic teaching.
Queer joy-centered sexuality education: offering a novel framework for gender-based violence prevention
(2024) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Falek, Joshua; Greenberg, Ellis
2SLGBTQ+ people face disproportionately high rates of gender-based violence (GBV) compared to cisgender heterosexual people. Scholars have predominantly responded to this violence by reporting on victimization, which homogenizes queer and trans life as misery. To avoid reproducing this joy-deficit, we propose a novel approach that centers queer sexual joy. As rape culture is symptomatic of cisheteronormativity, queer sexual joy is a useful analytic with which to subvert GBV. Drawing on findings from the Queer Sexual Joy project, a mixed-methods study involving 100 young adults from Canada and the US, we introduce six recommendations for a framework to focalize queer and trans sexual joy in GBV prevention education, including: 1) containers for safety; 2) communication strategies; 3) bodily autonomy; 4) trauma-informed, anti-oppression, 5) pleasure; and 6) dissociation and grounding practices. We propose that GBV education rooted in queer sexual joy would reorient all youth from hegemonic sexual scripts and provide a frame for more just sexual cultures.
Cripping and queering gender-based violence prevention: bridging disability justice, queer joy, and consent education
(2024) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Manuel, Caitlin A.
Although frequently relegated to the periphery in conversations about gender-based violence prevention, the disabling impacts of traumatised subjectivity both affect survivors’ abilities to fully participate in sex and contribute to survivors being more than twice as likely to be sexually (re)victimised compared to peers without trauma histories. In this paper, we seek to crip and queer approaches to gender-based violence prevention, particularly consent education, by learning from 2SLGBTQ+ and disabled trauma survivors’ affective experiences of queer, crip sexual joy and the radically messy ways in which they establish their own care networks for deeply pleasurable sex through the principles of disability justice. Refusing pathologising understandings of survivors as those who need to be cured, we highlight traumatised subjectivity as emblematic of the ambiguity and ambivalence inherent in sex as well as the possibilities for caring, consensual sex that moves beyond the concept of consent employed in colonial, neoliberal capitalist societies’ binary (Yes/No) consent laws. Drawing on the work of crip and queer theorists such as Mia Mingus, Alison Kafer, Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, and J. Logan Smilges, we reveal how disability justice principles, such as interdependence, collective access, and access intimacy, offer transformative understandings for anti-violence efforts.
Mixed reviews: perceptions of prison health care delivery in Western Canadian prisons
(2024) Schultz, William; Link, Nathan W.; Novisky, Meghan A.; Fahmy, Chantal
Prison health care is often described as substandard and reduces the quality of life for those experiencing incarceration. However, examining incarcerated peoples’ perceptions of prison health care reveals specific nuances on the topic. I draw on 587 interviews with incarcerated people and 131 correctional officer interviews, collected as part of the University of Alberta Prisons Project, to detail how incarcerated people perceive prison health care. First, a substantial minority of participants describe prison health care as a positive part of their experience, specifically detailing its impact on substance use and chronic health problems. Second, participants describe gaps in prison health care, with a specific focus on medication provision and communication. Finally, participants describe prison health care as a form of capricious governance, which increases the pain of incarceration. Together, these three themes shed light on how prison health care shapes the experiences of incarcerated people. Post-print version.
Correctional officers and the ongoing health implications of prison work
(2025) Schultz, William; Ricciardeli, Rosemary
Correctional Service Providers (CSP), including Correctional officers (COs), are key front-line figures in prisons globally, with responsibility for a wide range of daily prison operations. Over the past decade, research on prison staff has massively grown. However, the portrait this scholarship draws is concerning. Research focusing on the physical, mental, and social wellbeing of prison staff consistently paints a picture of a deeply unhealthy group of people, with above-average levels of physical health concerns. Likewise, recent literature suggests correctional employees are facing a mental health crisis, with high prevalence of mental health disorders and self-harming behaviors, even when compared to other law enforcement personnel. Further, scholars have expressed concerns about the social and cultural wellbeing of staff, factors that directly impact daily prison operations. We conduct a broad overview of the literature on correctional worker health and wellness, identifying key themes and major areas of concern. We conclude by identifying key challenges and proposing areas for future research.
Discretion as weakness: exploring the relationship between correctional officers’ attitudes toward discretion and attempted boundary violations
(2024) Stevens, Leanne; Schultz, William; Patterson, Andrew C.
Research paints discretion as a tool correctional officers (COs) use to navigate their work. Discretion helps COs gain compliance and resolve conflicts amicably, and officers sometimes use it to improve relationships with incarcerated people. However, research also suggest that COs’ reliance on discretionary power may produce harmful complications, undermining institutional regulations and creating conditions for serious rule violations. Little quantitative analysis exists on how CO discretion impacts prison operations, making the broader impact of discretion unclear. To address this gap, we use open-access data collected between 2017–2018 (Griffin & Hepburn, 2020). We then test whether a CO’s attitude toward discretion may correspond with attempts from incarcerated people to encourage boundary violations. Results show that COs with more liberal attitudes toward discretion correspond with higher odds of being approached by incarcerated people to violate boundaries. Black COs have lower odds of being approached for minor boundary violations, while women officers have higher odds of having incarcerated people try to initiate an inappropriate relationship. Findings show that liberal attitudes among COs toward discretion may encourage incarcerated people to violate the most consequential prison rules. We conclude by discussing the implications for future research.
Canadian correctional officers, institutionalization, and the social impacts of prison work
(2024) Stevens, Leanne; Schultz, William
Researchers often use institutionalization to explain the psychological impact of imprisonment on incarcerated people, but little is known about how institutionalization processes may impact other actors in prison, such as correctional officers (COs). New research consistently describes prison work as a damaging experience, something that significantly impacts short and long-term health outcomes of COs. A broad reading of the institutionalization literature demonstrates remarkable similarities to CO mental health research, raising questions about whether institutionalization frameworks can help us understand prison work. We draw on 131 interviews with Canadian COs to examine this possibility, and find that COs draw broad institutionalization narratives framing prison work as a distinctly harmful experience with lasting impacts on their personalities, identities, and relationships. We conclude by discussing the implications of using institutionalization as a means of understanding correctional work.
A good place to do time? Detailing the construction of symbolic social boundaries in correctional boot camps
(2024) Schultz, William; Bucerius, Sandra M.; Haggerty, Kevin D.
Drawing on qualitative interviews with 51 incarcerated adult men and nine correctional officers in a Western Canadian prison system, we ask why some incarcerated people find it appealing to be placed on correctional boot camp units and what such appeals tell us about broader conditions of incarceration. Participants on three boot camp units drew on narratives relating to (a) extrinsic benefits, (b) discipline and structure, (c) teamwork and positive relationships, and (d) an opportunity for self-improvement to construct symbolic boundaries between “normal” units and boot camps, as well as their former self and their transformed current self. By drawing symbolic boundaries between the past and present and between other units and their boot camp unit, our participants create narratives that allow them to partially mitigate some pains of imprisonment.
“The loving queer gaze”: the epistemological significance of queer joy
(2024) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Falek, Joshua
This article contends with queer joy as an epistemology to highlight an affective experience that grounds a basis for revising dominant approaches to sexual ethics. Drawing on findings from a mixed-methods study with 100 2SLGBTQ+ young adults from Canada and the US, we argue that queer and trans people mobilize queer sexual joy as an epistemology of script breaking that led participants to explore freedom and play, enjoy novel forms of care and communality, and to challenge oppression. We found that 2SLGBTQ+ young adults are undermining dominant sexual cultures which perpetuate gender-based violence through cisheteronormative logics of objectification and dominance. Rather than simply producing misery, normative sex and gender regimes produced a disorientation among 2SLGBTQ+ young adults which was fruitful for breaking sexual scripts and developing approaches to sex and relationships grounded in greater authenticity, creativity, reciprocity, play, and joy. We propose that by taking queer joy as a way of knowing, we may learn how queer and trans people negotiate the performativity of gender and sex, their own bodily knowledge, and the epistemic injustices that have precluded this knowledge from being valued. Pushing against the “joy deficit” in sociology that constrains the field to the study of the misery that minority communities face, this paper not only demonstrates what sociologists might learn from the texture of queer and trans lives, but also how these lessons can help to undermine cisheteronormativity as a root cause of gender-based violence.
Research recast(ed): S3E11 - Investigating differences in learning in higher education
(2024) Leschyshyn, Brooklyn; Smadis, Natalie; Hills, Melissa
In this episode, we talk with Dr. Melissa Hills about ways to improve student learning experiences and create more inclusive learning environments for different types of learners. Dr. Hills explains the Universal Design for Learning framework, which helps educators design learning experiences that work for everyone. For more information about Dr. Melissa Hills work please visit: Hills & Peacock (2022). Replacing Power with Flexible Structure: Implementing Flexible Deadlines to Improve Student Learning Experiences. Teaching and Learning Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.10.26. Hills. (2023) The value of team-based learning in a pandemic and five simple tips to get started. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education. https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.21713.
Research methods: exploring the social world in Canadian contexts
(2024) Symbaluk, Diane; Hall, Robyn
Research Methods: Exploring the Social World in Canadian Contexts, third edition, provides students with a readily accessible introduction to research methodology. This open textbook covers qualitative and quantitative methods, guiding readers through planning and conducting research, proposal writing, and report creation while addressing common research errors and challenges. Key topics include ethics, research design, sampling, experiments, surveys, qualitative interviewing, ethnography, and mixed-method approaches.
Research recast(ed): S3E3 - Bringing young minds to MacEwan through experiences, experiments, and fun with Dr. Emily Milne, Dr. Kaitlyn Towle, and Steven Campbell
(2023) Leschyshyn, Brooklyn; Smadis, Natalie; Milne, Emily; Towle, Kaitlyn; Campbell, Steven
On today’s episode, we talk to Dr. Emily Milne, Kaitlyn Towle, and Steven Cambell about MacEwanCYU. With the help of MacEwan, students from Ben Calf Robe can learn about what the university has to offer. Their project helps to inspire young minds and invite them to aspire to a secondary education.
“Hesitation gets you killed:” perceived vulnerability as an axiomatic feature of correctional officer working personalities
(2023) Schultz, William
Research on correctional officers (COs) has expanded over the past two decades, giving us a broad picture into the mental health, culture, and discretionary practices of a traditionally overlooked branch of law enforcement. However, gaps in this portrait remain. Drawing on 131 semi-structured qualitative interviews with Canadian COs, I demonstrate how COs’ perceptions of vulnerability powerfully shape officer actions and working personalities. To explain this, I introduce the concept of the vulnerability axiom, a cultural heuristic that frames how officers perceive their position within prisons. COs describe themselves as vulnerable to threats posed by incarcerated people, managers, and other officers, and act in specific ways to mediate these threats. The vulnerability axiom shapes how COs perceive their position within the prison, impacting relationships with managers and incarcerated people and shaping officer control behaviors. I conclude by discussing how the vulnerability axiom may help to reframe future CO research.

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