I am a sociologist educated in Canada and France. From Montréal, I am fluently bilingual in English and French.
I earned degrees from Ottawa PhD (medical sociology), McGill MUP (rural and small-town studies), and Bishop’s BA (liberal arts). I held postdoctoral fellowships at McGill (biomedical ethics) and York (sociology). I joined the University of Toronto in 2013.
My scholarship is directly shaped by my prior career as a street-level social services worker, urban planner, rural planner, and cooperative housing developer. I worked professionally in central and Atlantic Canada (Prince Edward Island, Quebec), Southeast Asia (Indonesia), Africa (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Senegal), and the southern Caribbean (Trinidad). I have been involved in HIV work for twenty years, most recently as board member for the HIV and AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario and as collaborator with the HIV Legal Network and la Coalition des organismes communautaires québécois de lutte contre le sida. In these milieus, I learned about people’s skill in contending with tensions and contradictions produced by opaque municipal, provincial, federal, supranational, and nongovernmental bureaucracies.
These experiences led me to organize a program of scholarly research as a series of institutional ethnographies into the social organization of knowledge of lay versus expert ways of knowing about medical, legal, and administrative practices and their implications. Within this frame, I have carried out and reported on fieldwork exploring forced immobility in Eritrea, cooperative organizing in Ethiopia, ethics of care in Iran, and socialist solidarities in Romania. In my studies, I take the standpoint of people toward whom exclusionary policy, law and regulation are directed with a view to understanding the inner workings of bureaucracies.
My research has been externally funded by the Canadian Bar Association, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, les Fonds de recherche du Québec, Reflet Salvéo, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.