I'm interested in the big questions of how we organize ourselves in society. Everyday billions of people worldwide produce enormous wealth in their activities at work and their communities. Yet access to this wealth, to resources and political power, is terribly unequal. Only a few people reap the full rewards of our collective labour, while many people are scraping to get by. How did this system come to be, and why do so many people go along with it? What would it look like to live in a truly democratic, socially just, and ecologically sustainable society? How do we get from here to there? My research and teaching focus on the broad question: What can we learn from, and how can we contribute to, social movements, labour unions, community organizations, and other forms of democracy from below?
Since becoming faculty at Laurier, I've co-written two books addressing these kinds of questions. Working with my friend and colleague Alan Sears (a sociologist at Ryerson University), we wrote A Good Book, in Theory: Making Sense Through Inquiry to help students improve their capacity to do rigorous theoretical thinking. The word "theory" is a good one for terrifying people or putting them to sleep. But rather than think about theory as a bunch of stale facts you must learn, I urge students to understand theoretical thinking as a powerful tool for identifying social problems to act upon the world to change it.
The other book that Alan and I wrote together, The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century, opens up questions about what it means to live in a democracy. Many of us take for granted that we live in a system based on the principle of "rule by the people." But who are the people and how do they govern? What sort of control over decision-making do you have at your job, in your classroom, in your community? Comparing and contrasting different models of democracy helps develop a clearer sense of how we might want to transform our ways of living together in the future. These are issues I love talking about in my Social and Environmental Justice (SEJ) class, "The Democratic Imagination."
I started the book I’m currently writing in the wake of the 2012 Quebec student strike. In the spring of that year, hundreds of thousands of students in Quebec organized a months-long strike against a 75% tuition hike. Their collective strike brought down the government, which effectively cancelled the hike. Brantford is less than a day's drive from Quebec, yet in Ontario, non-rebellion remains the norm on campus. Why? I began interviewing students at Laurier about their hopes and fears.
The students I interviewed at Laurier felt frustrated about high tuition and the debt they've taken on. They worried about a bleak job market and cuts to government services. They were angry, but rarely did they express the sense that they were entitled to something better. Most students were resigned to using their individual talents and willingness to be flexible in order to navigate today's harsh socio-economic waters.
At the same time as I was conducting these interviews, I was reading a lot about the so-called "entitlement epidemic" among today's youth. You hear it all the time from employers and journalists, and in all sorts of popular culture: Millennials are so entitled! There seemed to me to be a contradiction between the supposed entitled millennial so often depicted on TV, and the actual millennials I was talking to in my interviews on campus. I've been investigating this contradiction for the past three years, drawing on interviews with millennials in various places in North America to write a book that debunks the myth of the age of entitlement.
My book argues that a new era of social justice and environmental sustainability depends on millennials demanding more, not settling for less. I'm excited to teach a new SEJ seminar this year, entitled "Millennials: Overly Entitled?" on the question of entitlement and the millennial generation.
One of the best parts of my job is participating in social justice activism on campus. I'm a member of Laurier Brantford's Collective for Feminist Action and Research, and I’m an active participant in the Radical Exchange reading group. I've helped organize campus events on social justice education, human rights in Palestine, free speech, and several issues around work and employment. I try to bring my research to a general audience by writing for non-academic publications such as the New Socialist webzine and Briarpatch magazine.
Teaching and researching in SEJ has helped me better understand social problems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and wealth inequality. It’s also generated hope that another world is possible.