Collaborations

My work extends to four additional ongoing collaborative projects.

Common Ground Initiative

The University of Alberta Common Ground Initiative, led by Dr. Jared Wesley, addresses dimensions of political culture in Alberta. As part of this initiative, I help run the Alberta Viewpoint Survey, an ongoing online survey aimed at gauging public opinion across the province. My primary focus within this project has been on documenting how the pandemic has affected economic insecurity among different groups of Albertans, reflected in multiple research briefs and Op-Eds.

Pandemics, Politics, and Misinformation

The 2022-2025 Kule Cohort of Scholars, focused on the topic of Pandemics, Politics, and Misinformation, brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Sociology, Political Science, English and Film Studies, History, and Engineering to address questions regarding inequality, politics, and misinformation. Most recently, we have been studying how parents have been coping with increased child illness throughout the past year. Over the coming years, we plan to host events, applying for funding, and develop a larger project that addresses how stories in Alberta have shaped people’s understanding of and response to the pandemic. The project will link stories on different levels, bringing in official stories told by leaders, dominant narratives, and individual-level stories, connected to people’s understandings of the world and feelings about it.

Edmonton Transitions Study

I recently joined the Edmonton Transitions Study (ETS) with Drs. Matthew Johnson, Harvey Krahn, and Nancy Galambos. The ETS is a 32 year (1985-2017) longitudinal study of school-work and youth-adult transitions and transitions to midlife. Over the next five years, we will gather 40-year follow-up data with a 9th wave of the survey, conduct a series of longitudinal analyses, and make the ETS data publicly available.

Advancing Social Methods for Social Change

With the support of a KIAS Research Cluster Grant on Advancing Social Methods for Social Change, I convened a group of eleven researchers located across departments of the university on a project centered on the question, Given the rapidly changing world of data, evidence, and method, how can we retool research methods and training to better support social justice, reduce inequality, and produce real change?

The project will include a broad scoping review of social research methods training with an emphasis on projects that focus on understanding and supporting social change, an examination of current training opportunities at the University of Alberta, and a community-based course-linked case study. We will also put research into action through a series of network sustaining activities that include a monthly methods seminar, a set of microcredentials, and an annual interdisciplinary methods workshop.