Research for Department of Sociology
Faculty members in the Department of Sociology are happy to involve undergraduate students in their research projects. Our faculty members often collaborate with other departments, community members and employers on research projects—giving you the opportunity to get additional hands-on experience with renowned professionals.
Kimberly Mair's research is concerned with the aesthetics of communication, cultural studies, social theory, participatory social movements, historical sociology, and intersections between care and security. She has published two books: Guerrilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerrilla (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016) and The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain (Bloomsbury Press, 2022). She is currently writing a new manuscript for the Critical Mass Observation Series called Ordinary Lives Beyond the Doorstep: Mass Observation’s An Enquiry into People’s Homes that aims to animate the encounters between investigators and working-class residents documented in the original fieldnotes for Mass Observation’s classic 1943 housing study that promised to give voice to “the people” on British postwar reconstruction. The project will draw from depictions of everyday material experiences during the air war that were left out of the published report –women incessantly scrubbing surfaces that will never look clean, a widow contemplating destroying the few cherished possessions she has left after an air bombing, an abandoned home full of beautiful objects, households struggling in the absence of family members– and situating them within broader historical and structural forces.
Suzanne Lenon is a feminist socio-legal scholar whose research is situated in the field of law, gender, and sexuality, informed by queer theory and critical race feminisms. Her scholarly engagement with the sociology of law interrogates the complex architecture of radicalized power that bolsters state regimes of social reproduction (e.g., marriage, inheritance) and undergirds progressive struggle for equality and redress. Her research is concerned primarily with matters of racial and gender justice within law and within queer legal and cultural struggles for state recognition. Her work has been published in Canadian Journal of Women & the Law, Feminist Legal Studies, Feminist Formations, Studies in Social Justice, and Social Identities, among others. She is co-editor (with Daniel Monk) of the collection Inheritance Matters: Kinship, Property, Law (Bloomsbury Press, 2023); and with OmiSoore H. Dryden of Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging (UBC Press, 2015) and more recently of a special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, “Beyond Homonationalisms: Queer(er) Possibilities of Elsewhere and Imagining Otherwise" (2025).
Athena Elafros is a qualitative cultural sociologist and has published in the areas of popular music, microaggressions, and social inequalities. For the past number of years, she has also started researching and teaching in the areas of critical disability studies and access. She is currently collaborating on a community-based oral history project titled, Seizures Unscripted: Oral Histories of Epilepsy in Canada and the United States. Her co-researchers on the project are Dr. Christopher Churchill, Alisa Jones, Linda McClure, Dr. Aparna Nair, and Yarrow Rubin. One of the primary goals of Seizures Unscripted is the creation of an open-access, accessible repository that will benefit epilepsy communities, scholars, and clinicians. By foregrounding lived experience over pathologized accounts, Seizures Unscripted repositions epilepsy not just as a neurological condition, but as a generative site for world-making, care, resistance, and cultural contribution. Seizures Unscripted is a project that is created by, for, and with people with epilepsy.