Department of Sociology

Dr. Nicole Myers discusses rising bail denials in Ontario

bej1 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:20:48 +0000

Dr. Nicole Myers discusses rising bail denials in Ontario bej1 Wed, 04/29/2026 - 09:20

Apply Now: Fall 2026 Walls to Bridges (SOCY406/PHIL406)

hck — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:57:56 +0000

Apply Now: Fall 2026 Walls to Bridges (SOCY406/PHIL406) hck Thu, 04/02/2026 - 13:57

Knowledge in the Making: Understanding Social Complexity

bej1 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:35:05 +0000

Knowledge in the Making: Understanding Social Complexity bej1 Fri, 03/13/2026 - 09:35

The Sociology Graduate Student Association (SGSA) warmly invites you to join us for our Annual Sociology Graduate Student Conference, Knowledge in the Making: Understanding Social Complexity, taking place on April 7 from 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM in Mackintosh-Corry Hall, B201.

This conference will feature presentations from graduate students across the department, showcasing a wide range of sociological research and perspectives. It will be a great opportunity to engage with emerging scholarship, support our graduate researchers, and connect with colleagues in the department.

Light refreshments and lunch will be provided for participants and guests.

Agenda

9:00-9:20 am | Coffee & Chat

9:20-9:30 am | Opening Remarks

9:35-10:30 am | Session 1 - Crime, Policing, and Corrections: Practice and Policy

10:35-11:50 am | Session 2 - Diverse Experiences of Knowledge Production and Consumption

11:50-12:50 pm | Lunch

12:50-1:45 pm | Session 3 - Time and Temporality

1:50-2:55 pm | Session 4 - Digital Media, Technology, and Experiences

3:00-3:45 pm | Session 5 - Work and Labour

3:45-3:50 pm | Closing Remarks

In/Access and Mobile Cartographies of Social Justice

hck — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:50:37 +0000

In/Access and Mobile Cartographies of Social Justice hck Wed, 03/11/2026 - 08:50

Overview

The symposium aims to map the intersecting cartographies of analog and digital justice encounters in im/mobile times, tracing how struggles over access, visibility, and participation unfold across material and discursive terrains. Justice is approached as a continuous process of contesting and rerouting the infrastructures, institutions, and power relations that shape who can move, who can appear, and who remains constrained, monitored, or erased.

Approaching access as a key register of social justice, the symposium centers what we call triadic mobilities: the entanglement of mobility as movement across spaces, collective political mobilization, and the technological infrastructures that mediate connection and access. Today, being mobile, being mobilized, and being on mobile devices intersect within increasingly datafied, surveilled, and platform-mediated environments.

We approach this gathering as a space to rethink in/access, in/visibility, and im/mobility in a moment marked by overlapping crises: intensifying border regimes, expanding digital surveillance, urban securitization, ecological disruption, and growing geopolitical tensions that reshape who can assemble, move, speak, and connect. Mobility, in this sense, is never simply about movement; it is organized through infrastructures of control and extraction — from biometric borders and platform governance to urban policing and algorithmic sorting.

The symposium therefore invites us to examine how contemporary regimes of access are organized across digital and non-digital terrains. Questions of who can gather, move, organize, and connect increasingly shape the political possibilities of our time. At the same time, struggles for justice emerge through hybrid forms of connection, where embodied mobilities, street politics, and analog networks intersect with digital platforms, algorithmic visibility, and technological gatekeeping.

From the opening plenary to the final fishbowl conversation, the symposium unfolds through interwoven questions that invite us to collectively interrogate how infrastructures of mobility and access are being reorganized — and how they might be contested, reimagined, and reclaimed.

How are the cartographies of social justice redrawn in an era of intensified im/mobility — from urban struggles and local resistance to transnational organizing and diasporic solidarities?
What does a politics of in/access reveal about freedom of movement when examined through processes of political mobilization, collective organizing, and the infrastructures that enable or constrain participation?
What does participation mean in contemporary research marked by uneven access and persistent in/accessibility?
How do mobile feminisms, critical disability movements, and migration justice struggles confront and reconfigure borders and barriers — across bodies, ideas, epistemologies, and both material and digital infrastructures?
How are solidarities made mobile in struggles for social justice? What dynamics emerge when communities collectively confront, negotiate, and reshape the systems that install borders and barriers in their lives?

Schedule

Time	Session	Location
11:00am-11:15am	Opening Plenary: Mobile Cartographies of Social Justice Opening Remarks: Dr. Pinar Tuzcu & Dr. Robel Abay	Robert Sutherland Hall, Room 202
11:15am-12:30pm	Keynote: Intelligibility, Opacity, and the Politics of In/Access, with Q&A Dr. Ahmed Allahwala, University of Toronto, Scarborough	Robert Sutherland Hall, Room 202
12:30pm-12:45pm	Coffee & Cake Break	Robert Sutherland Hall, Room 202
12:45pm-2:00pm	Roundtable: Looking for a Better Wor(I)d - Mobility in Multiple Registers Moderation: Dr. Pinar Tuzcu Discussants: Dr. Burcu Baba, Dr. Carolyn Prouse, Dr. Kristin Moriah, Dr. Marshall Hill, Dr. Samantha King, Paul Akpomuje (PhD Candidate)	Robert Sutherland Hall, Room 202
2:00pm-2:30pm	Lunch/Afternoon Break	Robert Sutherland Hall, Room 202
2:30pm-4:00pm	Workshop: Participatory Research in Contexts of In/Accessibility Facilitated by: Dr. Robel Abay & Dahye Yim	Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room A311
4:00pm-4:30pm	Refreshments & Snack Break	Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room A311
4:30pm-5:15pm	Fishbowl Discussion: Mobile Feminisms and Queer Technologies of Access Facilitated by: Dr. Yasmine Djerbal	Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room A311

Session Descriptions

Opening Plenary: Intelligibility, opacity, and the politics of in/access

Keynote: Dr. Ahmed Allahwala University of Toronto Scarborough

In organizing who can appear in public, who can claim protection, and who counts as a subject of rights, intelligibility is a fundamental dimension of any politics of in/access. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, I understand intelligibility as the condition under which a life becomes recognizable, livable, and grievable. Yet the processes that render subjects visible and legible in a politics of in/access also render them governable, classifiable, and exposed to surveillance. In/access thus operates through epistemic regimes that determine who qualifies as the “right” kind of body, citizen, or public. I place Butler in conversation with Édouard Glissant, particularly his call to “clamour the right to opacity.” For Glissant, opacity is neither exclusion nor withdrawal, but an ethical and political demand within colonial and racializing orders that exert control through visibility, transparency, and placement. Engaging empirical vignettes on racist violence, urban securitization, and struggles over queer public space from Europe and North America, my intention is to shift our cartographic imagination from maps as representation to maps as practice. If the symposium calls for mobile cartographies of social justice, I ask us to pause over the cartographic impulse itself: who gets mapped, who benefits from visibility and legibility, when does access become exposure, and when might justice require remaining partially—and deliberately—unmapped?

Roundtable: Looking for a Better Wor(l)d — Mobility in Multiple Registers

Moderation: Pinar Tuzcu (Sociology)

Discussants: burcu Baba (Gender Studies), Carolyn Prouse (Geography and Planning), Kristin Moriah (Black Studies), Marshall Hill (English Literature and Creative Writing), Samatha King (Kinesiology and Health Studies), Paul Akpomuje (Faculty of Education)

This roundtable brings together scholars from related fields to create a space for thinking across disciplinary boundaries. The conversation explores how mobility and access are experienced, regulated, contested, and reimagined from an interdisciplinary perspective. As these concepts move across discourses and material realities, the discussion draws on each discussant’s research to reflect on a set of shared questions: What do mobility and accessibility mean in neocolonial and increasingly authoritarian times? How do mobility and access resonate differently across fields of inquiry? What shifts when we approach these questions through the lenses of digital space, health, race, gender, class, and disability? Where do our approaches intersect — and where do they productively diverge?

Workshop I: Participatory Research in Contexts of In/Accessibility

Facilitated by: Robel Abay and Dahey Yim (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)

This interactive workshop explores the meanings and limits of participation, research ethics, and methodological design across uneven regimes of access in participatory research settings. It is open to all participants and especially recommended for graduate students from across campus and different departments.

Fishbowl Discussion: Mobile Feminisms and Queer Technologies of Access

Facilitated by: Dr. Yasmine Djerbal

In this rotating, participant-driven discussion, we collectively explore how migrant, internationalist, and anti-colonial feminist practices navigate and reshape regimes of in/access in the digital times. How do anti-colonial feminist, queer, and disability justice practices develop alternative technologies of access to navigate — or move beyond — the structures that dictate accessibility and regulate mobility? The conversation builds on insights that emerge throughout the symposium, inviting participants to collectively rethink how access, mobility, and solidarity can be reorganized.

The discussion will also engage materials created by MELT (Ren Loren Britton and Iz Paehr), including work from their Meltionary project, which explores trans*feminist and disability justice approaches to access, language, and technological practice. These materials will serve as an additional point of reflection for collectively thinking through how alternative infrastructures of access and the possibilities of to-be-mobile can be imagined and put into practice.

Registration

Please register in advance:

This symposium is open to faculty, staff, students, and community members. Lunch & refreshments included.

Questions? Contact pinar.tuzcu@queensu.ca

Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies Conference 2026: Systems, Individuals, and Publics

hck — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:39:02 +0000

Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies Conference 2026: Systems, Individuals, and Publics hck Mon, 03/09/2026 - 13:39

Join us for the 2026 Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies Conference, a dynamic gathering of scholars and students exploring the complex relationships between systems, individuals, and the publics they shape, chaired by Associate Professor, Victoria A. Sytsma, PhD.

Conference Schedule

Panel 1: 8:30am-9:30am - Criminal Justice: Systems, Data, and Actors
Panel 2: 9:45am-10:45am - Interpersonal Violence, Social Disadvantage, and Supports
Keynote Speaker: 11:00am-11:45am - Professor Emeritus Vincent Sacco, Policing Disorder or Disorderly Policing: Crime in Large Social Gathering

Coffee and treats will be provided. This event is open to all Queen's staff and students.

Miles, Carrie

bb13 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:33:24 +0000

Miles, Carrie bb13 Tue, 03/03/2026 - 09:33

Last name

Miles

First name

Carrie

Position / job title

Hub 1 Associate Manager

carrie.miles@queensu.ca

People Directory Affiliation Category

Administration

Office location

Mackintosh-Corry Hall, B413

Faculty

Arts and Science

The Fatal Nexus between incarceration and mental health: The tragic story of Soleiman Faqiri

bej1 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:21:00 +0000

The Fatal Nexus between incarceration and mental health: The tragic story of Soleiman Faqiri bej1 Tue, 02/03/2026 - 10:21

Register here.

Film Screening and Fireside Discussion hosted by Dr. Nicole Myers

YUSUF FAQIRI is an advocate within the Justice System for vulnerable Canadians who suffer from Mental Illness. In 2016, he founded the Justice for Soli Movement, a Grass Roots National Based Organization, after the tragic death of his brother Soleiman Faqiri in a Canadian Prison. He is fluent in English, French, Farsi and Arabic. He has had significant media presence in Toronto and Montreal in both English and French, and appeared often on CBC, Radio-Canada, CTV, Global News, City TV, CTV, CP24, Canadian Press, Toronto Star as a Mental Health Advocate. He has been published several times in both the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and Policy Options.

PhD candidate Hannah Walsh co-publishes new article in Critical Criminology

hck — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:03:45 +0000

PhD candidate Hannah Walsh co-publishes new article in Critical Criminology hck Thu, 01/29/2026 - 14:03

Listening Carefully to Students’ Ambivalence: Lessons for Qualitative Researchers

hck — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:57:27 +0000

Listening Carefully to Students’ Ambivalence: Lessons for Qualitative Researchers hck Tue, 01/27/2026 - 14:57

Please join us for the latest Department of Sociology Seminar Series: Listening Carefully to Students’ Ambivalence: Lessons for Qualitative Researchers, featuring Jessica Fields.

Abstract: As a space of emotional liminality, ambivalence is often considered an anxious and undesirable position, marked by the failure of indecision. However, feminist qualitative researchers have pointed to the specific epistemological value of ambivalence. In this talk, I’ll share insights from a co-authored paper on the ambivalence threading through the mentoring relationships on a multi-method, multi-disciplinary, and multi-site qualitative research team. Many of the young, racialized, queer, and first-generation student research assistants on this team are asking non-normative research questions, pursuing emerging subfields, or aligned with historically excluded identities and experiences. We explore how to ease the expectation that young, racialized, queer, and first-generation students, mentees, and trainees demonstrate a commitment to institutions and disciplines about which they may be profoundly and rightfully ambivalent. We consider also how feminist qualitative researchers can notice and learn from the ambivalence of the students and mentees we support, trusting that their ambivalence signals a meaningful engagement with the aims, practices, and outcomes of feminist qualitative research and mentorship amid intersecting experiences of, among other things, race, age, and power.

Bio: Jessica Fields is a sociologist in the University of Toronto Scarborough Department of Health & Society and a member of the University of Toronto graduate faculties in Sociology and Sexual Diversity Studies. Fields considers the ways sexuality education routinely exacerbates the struggles of already disadvantaged groups—young people, low-income students, students of color, and sexual nonconformists—while enfranchising the more privileged. Fields is co-PI on 4theRecord, a study of risk in the lives of queer and racialized young women in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, funded by the Canadian Tri-Council New Frontiers in Research Fund (PI: Sarah Flicker, York University).

Dr. Robel Abay Appointed Visiting Professor in Sociology

hck — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:19:37 +0000

Dr. Robel Abay Appointed Visiting Professor in Sociology hck Tue, 01/27/2026 - 11:19