Conference Sessions

Community engaged research and work continues to become more mainstream within our discipline, with sociologists recognizing the ways in which community engaged projects can provide opportunities for more insightful and ethical work. This session will explore the “work” that goes on behind the scenes of community engaged sociology. Proposals were welcomed from those researching, teaching, or contributing to the community engaged space, to share insights around the challenges of these projects, the successes, and ideas for how to develop our community engaged work. Sessions which describe the process of teaching community engaged sociology or conducting a community engaged research project are encouraged.

While home care carries with it the possibility of interdependence, autonomy, and deinstitutionalization, it is situated within broader contexts of colonial extraction, transnational migration, and the austere neoliberal welfare state. In its current form, home care harms low-income im/migrant workers, disabled people and people with dementia, for the benefit of corporate home care companies. Contemporary home care conditions, including waitlists to access care, precarity, and inconsistency reinforce reliance on institutionalization, informal caregiving, and emergency room visits. Simultaneously, direct care work itself can be debilitating while many im/migrant direct care workers and their families face formal and informal exclusions in accessing state supports.In order to transform home care systems, there is a need to strengthen care relations and coalitional politics between im/migrant direct care workers and low-income disabled and older home care users. Dominant ideas in care theory, politics, and political organizing maintain the historical tensions that have sowed division between disabled people, older people, and im/migrant direct care workers. The politics and frameworks of disability and migrant justice disrupt these historical tensions by pursuing cross-movement solidarity in recognition of the entanglement of collective liberation. By centering relationality and forging coalitions, this session mobilizes social movement research and community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches to grapple with the possibilities of disability and migrant justice-informed home care alternatives that build solidarity and coalition across equity-deserving communities. As organizers, researchers, care workers and care recipients, engaging with other grassroots organizations that work towards building community capacity through the lens of disability justice and migrant justice.

This panel will explore the experiences of Black and racialized faculty members teaching about race and racism in predominantly White university classrooms. In the current post-George Floyd context, there is a backlash against ‘wokeness’ by conservative and right wing individuals and groups who attack racialized and Black faculty for teaching Critical Race Theory or engaging in critical discussions about race and racism. Black and racialized faculty members often face reprisals in the form of lower student evaluations, complaints to the administration, or social media attacks. Using a theoretical grounding in Critical Race Theory (CRT) and intersectionality theory, panelists will discuss the challenges and opportunities that they face as Black/racialized bodies in overwhelmingly White spaces. Critical race theory is a helpful theoretical lens to understand educational praxis contexts. Critical race theorists adopt a position known as ‘racial realism’ which holds that racism is a means by which societies allocate privilege and status (Delgado et al., 2017). CRT recognizes that education systems are far from race-neutral (Crenshaw, 2011; Delgado et al., 2017; Gillborn & Ladson-Billings, 2010; Goldberg, 2009; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Intersectionality provides a wider theoretical lens to examine the multiple intersecting identities of Black/racialized faculty (Collins, 2000). This panel will offer insights and promising practices to engender greater institutional support for Black/racialized faculty teaching White students about race and racism.

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This session is cross-listed with the Canadian Association of Sociology of Education (CASE).

This session features novel work from critical scholars who employ Canadian feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith’s approach to studies in the social organization of knowledge, known as institutional ethnography (IE). IE’s focus on exploring and critiquing ruling relations that organize contemporary capitalist societies offers a particular contribution to scholarship and activism committed to creating equitable futures. Scholars working with IE have created a trajectory of research that critically interrogates social relations that shape inequities across health care, education, and the social service sector. More recently, scholars have developed creative applications of IE in studies that traverse such settings as digital online spaces, urban landscapes, and the criminal legal system. This panel features papers that reflect on how IE can contribute to broad efforts to challenge hate and sustain shared futures through discussions of examples of institutional ethnographic projects and/or through methodological reflections on the core features of institutional ethnography.

This session features novel work from critical scholars who employ Canadian feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith’s approach to studies in the social organization of knowledge, known as institutional ethnography (IE). IE’s focus on exploring and critiquing ruling relations that organize contemporary capitalist societies offers a particular contribution to scholarship and activism committed to creating equitable futures. Scholars working with IE have created a trajectory of research that critically interrogates social relations that shape inequities across health care, education, and the social service sector. More recently, scholars have developed creative applications of IE in studies that traverse such settings as digital online spaces, urban landscapes, and the criminal legal system. This panel features papers that reflect on how IE can contribute to broad efforts to challenge hate and sustain shared futures through discussions of examples of institutional ethnographic projects and/or through methodological reflections on the core features of institutional ethnography.