Conference Sessions

In 2019, there were 1.36 million undergraduate students attending Canadian Universities. Further, just under one-third (31.6%) of the Canadian population under 65 has attended a university in their lifetime (Statistics Canada, 2021). These figures underline the immense impact university educators make every year, and the important obligation therein to improve students’ educational experience. Recent events have brought to the forefront the need to address structural inequities. These include the disproportionate populations and students affected by COVID, police brutality and other forms of systemic racism, and ongoing mental health crises. This session features presentations that offer ways to improve equity within university courses through design, delivery, or assessment.

This session examines from a sociological perspective the role of a range of media during the COVID-19 pandemic. The session covers distinct media including traditional media such as newspapers and social media such as Reddit and Twitter. The session examines current topics such as disinformation and its diffusion through various channels, media representations of long-term care, and information on face mask use on social media. The session makes important contributions to theory and policy.

Digital sociology scholarship offers unique insights into the many ways that social practices change alongside the development of new technologies. This session highlights the diversity of recent research that examines the complex intersections between technology and social change. Presentations cover the following topics: digital game play experiences in embodied spaces, the complications arising from the increasing hybridization of work, navigating the tensions associated with new technological integration within health care settings, and the relationship between genetic engineering technologies and biodiversity.

This session situates itself within the premise that the process of “disenchanting discourse” (Wynter, 1987, p. 207) or “delinking” from what Mignolo terms “the colonial matrix of power” (2011, p. 9) entails a confrontation with many of the taken for granted assumptions within Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). One of these assumptions is the ways in which child developmentalism continues to preserve beliefs in normal development in a manner that simultaneously generates categories of exclusion or conditional inclusion within a range of ECEC settings. We seek to inquire together about what might happen when we move "childhood beyond pathology" (Farley, 2018) through a disenchantment with conceptions of typical development that continue to sustain unjust racist, ableist, classist logics of the heteropatriarchal neoliberal order?

In a year that has seen Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, mass graves discovered at former residential schools, Islamophobic hate crimes, and broad reports of sexualized assault on university campuses, many faculty, students, and staff feel compelled to provide spaces to understand these and other forms of social inequality and to engage in meaningful actions towards change on campus and beyond. This labour carries significant costs for those who engage in efforts towards social change. In this panel we reflect upon the impacts of “Igniting Change” in classrooms and beyond.