Ferdinand Caballero,

caballer@yorku.ca

Broadly, my research interests include the anthropology of space and place, urban studies, architecture, material culture, migration, and religion. For my current research, I intend to conduct a study that will be situated in a chosen urban centre in Canada, where there is a significant volume of immigrants from Southeast Asia (The Philippines). This study will investigate the connection of ethnic identity-construction instantiated in ‘inscribed spaces’. This thesis research will either support or challenge the current conditions of ‘Canadian Multiculturalism’.

In addition to my academic interests, I also find the delight in consuming spicy cuisines and indulge myself in travelling— especially in the old cities of the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia.

Petra Diop,

pmdiop@yorku.ca

With a background in classical music and social anthropology, my Masters
research interests lie in the realm of human rights as pertaining to persons in protracted refugee situations. My focus is centered on the rehabilitation of
child soldiers in transnational settings. There are clear power differentials
between nationals and refugees and I plan to explore the extent to which there has been a silencing of traditional knowledge for persons in protracted refugee situations and how such knowledge can be used in the rehabilitation, healing, and reintegration of refugees and child soldiers. Many youth bear profound psychological scars coupled with an uncertainty of their place in the world, and traditional knowledge can be used to instil a sense of belonging, security, and freedom in an environment where substantial numbers of youth become prone to gang activity.

Malissa Farnham,

malifarn@yorku.ca

My Master's research involves documenting the experience of homeless youth in Ontario, looking at the ways in which history and institutional forces shape their everyday lives. My field work takes place at a youth shelter in York Region where there has recently been an upsurge of research on homelessness mostly pertaining to addictions and mental health issues. My aim is to use anthropological methods and analysis to open up overlooked aspects of the everyday experience of youth poverty and unemployment in this particular region. Currently I am working with participants on creative and collaborative ways to document pathways to/from homelessness.

Mary Jean Hande,

maryjean@yorku.ca

Mary Jean hails from Saskatoon, SK where she did her undergraduate work in Anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan. Before moving to Toronto sheworked with a number of activist organizations. This involvement aroused a passionate interest in social justice movements, particularly in the area of disability. At York University, her interests have further developed around Medical Anthropology and recent theory concerning bio-sociality and biological citizenship. This in turn inspired her thesis project on the Canadian “Liberation Therapy Movement”—also sparked by a new, controversial theory about Multiple Sclerosis and its treatment—that has rapidly grabbed public attention in the last two years. Mary Jean has been talking to MS patients pursuing this therapy to get a better understanding of the role of media, online social networking, political and spiritual rhetoric, and the economy of hope that fuel this movement.

Alison Hill,

alisonh@yorku.ca

I completed my Bachelor’s degree at the University of Alberta in 2009 with a major in Anthropology and a minor in Native Studies.  Though my interest throughout my undergrad was primarily in archaeology and human evolution, I’ve come to York’s Master of Arts program to learn more about Medical Anthropology, specifically how it pertains to women’s reproductive and sexual health.  My research in the past has explored differing forms of maternal healthcare, and their effectiveness in meeting the needs of Status Aboriginal women; how advocacy organizations act as an intermediary between healthcare professionals and teenage mothers; and the portrayal of the pregnant body as a desexualized object.  Over the next two years I hope to analyze popular perceptions of pregnancy and motherhood, and examine how these affect the training and attitudes of caregivers, and ultimately therefore the quality of care provided to mothers.  When I’m not reading, writing, or thinking, I can usually be found in my kitchen, making pie. 

Gabor Jozsa,

gjozsa@yorku.ca

I like to laugh and I laugh often. Although a simple statement, this assertion
serves as a powerful motivating force for my interest in researching how
humourous performances are generated and modulated. Humour can be fun and distracting but it has always been a pervasive part of the human experience and as such it is worthy of our attention. Aside from humour I am interested in anthropological theory, pedagogy, and the public service. In 2006 I completed my BA in East Asian Studies at the University of Calgary, and prior to coming to York in 2010 I completed my second BA at U of C, this time in Anthropology.

Sherylann Monteiro,

sheryl72@yorku.ca

Graduated summa cum laude from York University with double honours in Philosophy and Anthropology in 2009.  Sherylann’s MA thesis project builds on and extends recent research in multispecies anthropology, anthropology of science, and medical anthropology, offering a new site to reconsider cultures and practices as more than human affairs.  Sherylann is creating an ethnographic account on the healing art of flower essence as an illustration of biocultural hope.  Flower essence remedies are to be understood as an exchange of energies across species barriers.  This practice is predicated on the inseparability of human and nonhuman life forms, offers a transformative view of what it means to be human, and actively expands western categories of what counts as sentience, consciousness, language, and agency.  Her research aspires to ontologically blur the long-standing divide between human and nonhuman life forms and offers an example of becoming across species barriers. 

Nicole Pariser,

npariser@yorku.ca

I began my MA at York in 2010, following the completion of a combined honours degree in Global Studies and Anthropology in 2009 at Wilfrid Laurier University.  While pursuing my undergraduate degree, I was fortunate to spend a term at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.  In broad terms, my research focuses on migration and mobility; who is allowed to move and who is not, and how these choices are justified, particularly by nation states to their citizenry.  As a human in the world I like to move and explore.Recognizing that access to safe and legal routes of migration are not universally available, despite the ease with which capital and goods, as well as specific bodies like mine, can flow across borders, I aim to interrogate the ways in which discriminatory migration policies are maintained and strengthened, specifically the ways in which disparities over mobility are obscured, embedded and justified within discourses of security and human rights.  My research has primarily focused on human trafficking, however following experiences in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, as well as San Francisco, specifically relating to homelessness and the passage of ‘no-sit-no-lie’ policies, my research interests have expanded to include the ways in which migration and mobility come to be constrained not only across national borders, but within them as well.  My feminism informs my work and I believe no one is illegal as well as in the transformative power of engaged anthropology and activism to expose, contest and change that which is unjust.  To maintain my sense of delight and wonder with the world I find comfort in my yoga practice, and seeking out opportunities to play.  Swing-sets and hula hoops are not just for kids.

Shalanda Phillips,

shalanda@yorku.c

Shalanda Phillips is a graduate student of social anthropology at York
University. She is fixated on modes of moving and the multifaceted theoretical terrain texturing the bodies therein. Her current research is principally concerned with embodied, sensuous, and affective practices approached through an ethnographic engagement with spun fire in the Greater Toronto Area. Alongside her scholarly interests, she also plays with and without fire through various mediums: hoop, staff, rope dart, and poi. Her interests more broadly deal with various dimensions of play, including published work on multi-partner sexual play and, more recently, a phenomenological inquiry into the sensory dimension of spinning fire.
Miss Phillips also enjoys the finer things in life: pubs, pints, and Star Trek.

Ian Puppe,

ianpuppe@yorku.ca

I fell into anthropology through an interest in language, poetry and hip hop music.  After completing my BA in anthropology at York I began my Master’s studies.  My current research interrogates understandings of stewardship, protection of the land, and the haunting affects of nostalgia in relation to the construction of authentic Canadian identities in Algonquin Provincial Park.  Working with theories of historical and visual anthropology, as well as theories of affect, my research employs experimental methods and ‘inventive’ ethnography.  I have broad interests in music, photography, film and experimental writing styles which strongly influence my work, and my play. 

Forouz Salari

forouzs@yorku.ca,

Prior to beginning my MA in Social Anthropology at York University in September 2011, I completed my BA at University of Toronto Scarborough, double majoring in Anthropology and Psychology. There I became interested in the study of religion and feminist thought. I believe that anthropology can only be done well if the researcher is highly passionate about and has a personal connection to their research endeavour. For me personally, a fascination and sometimes obsession with learning more about my roots in Iran, a place that I emigrated from at a young age and to which I returned to marry my childhood friend, has always led me to tailor my projects and papers on different themes and issues related to Iran. In the final semester of my undergraduate studies, I conducted a small ethnographic project in Toronto on Iranian Canadian women's experiences with Islamic veiling (hijab). The results of this project have led me to focus my MA MRP on the intersection between the sartorial practice of veiling and concepts of modesty, sexuality, and gender equality in Islam. In addition, cross-cultural comparisons will allow me to better situate the significance of the veil in the context of post-revolutionary Iran. My interest in this project is very personal as I was temporarily detained in Tehran in the summer of 2007, along with thousands of other women across the country, by the Morality Police for "improper veiling", during one of the state's veiling correction endeavours.

Joseph Wickenhauser,

jpw@yorku.ca

After completing an undergraduate degree in linguistics, Joe attained a position as a Research Assistant at the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture in the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan. There he worked as a Research Assistant on a project called Translating Research in Elder Care and was involved in research related to the Rural and Remote Memory Clinic, an inter-professional, one-stop clinic for seniors living in rural Saskatchewan. Out of this experience and an interest in studying sexuality, Joe is focusing his Master's work on studying queer sexualities and aging in rural areas in Canada.  Specifically, he is exploring the life experiences and formation of support networks of older gay men living in rural Saskatchewan.

Nayrouz Abu-Hatoum,

nayrouz@yorku.ca

My area of interest is drawn from my personal experiences with movement, fragmented belongings, bordered spaces, violence and conflict. In my Master thesis I dealt with the notion of ‘home’ and ‘exile’ through the experience of diasporic Muslims in Toronto. Drawing on that I intend to investigate for my PhD ideas and notions of belonging in constantly transforming border zones spaces. My empirical encounter will take place in Palestine around the Israeli-built apartheid wall in Palestinian lands, where I intend to explore creation of new spaces of belonging and resistance to state power.

Anisa Anwar,

ananwar@yorku.ca

Medical Anthropology becomes a major focus of my research interest through my M.Phil. research among the Santals of Northern Bangladesh where I examined Santal reproduction practices, specifically women’s perspectives on their body, pregnancy, childbirth, infertility, and postpartum experiences. From 2000-2002, I completed M.Phil degree in Social Anthropology from University of Bergen, Norway. For PhD my current research interest lies in exploring the community and cultural understanding of preventive health care practices regarding breast health care among the first generation newcomer Bangladeshi immigrant women in Toronto. I plan to build on this research by exploring attitudes towards health care specifically breast cancer prevention and to investigate changes, if any, in past and present attitudes towards breast cancer awareness and available treatment. I started my career in teaching Social Anthropology at SahJalal University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh in 1999. Later on I worked as a contract faculty in Anthropology Department at Cosumnes River College, LosRios Community College District of California (2005-2007) and at California State University, Sacramento (2006-2007).

Melissa Atkinson-Graham,

matkigra@yorku.ca

Fascinated by what is know of matter and what can be know of matter, my research interests focus on the involvements between substances, surfaces, forces and the processes that constitute the materiality of bodily being. My Master's thesis project, The Body in and of Craniosacral Therapy, ethnographically examined these themes through questions of embodiment, energy, healing, pedagogy and practice in the alternative and complementary health field of craniosacral therapeutics. In terms of my dissertation research, I am interested in expanding upon these questions more thoroughly in order to flesh out the political, historical, and sociocultural entanglements that shape the materialization of bodies in both biomedicine and alternative health. To this end, I am interested in exploring the ways in which sentience has been modeled and propagated in and through molecular and cellular bodies in biomedical research and alternative health practices. More broadly, my research interests take form in relation to such topics as affect, sensation, phenomenology, body politics, performance, pedagogy, risk and representation, visual culture, and contemporary art. 

Umit Aydogmus,

uaydogms@yorku.ca

My area of interest lies at the intersections of neoliberalism, employment, citizenship, religious movements, politics and changing discourses of adult education, urban governance, poverty, social policies and constellations of new govern mentalities in Turkey. Specifically, I am interested in the enhanced role of Istanbul metropolitan municipality led institutions, and their particular discourses of citizenship, employment and society, from the mid-1990s onwards under neoliberal globalization. I developed particular interest about these issues during my graduate (MA) education at Bogazici University in Department of Sociology (Istanbul/Turkey) and 2nd Masters Study at Lund University in the Program of Development Studies. I took my undergraduate degree in Sociology at Bogazici University. In addition to these issues, I am interested in social and political theory, civil society organizations, creative industries and communities, urban politics, social movements, gender, affect and masculinities, action research and participatory ethnographies, political anthropology and visual/media anthropology. In my spare time, I usually work on my latest translation; wander in the streets of Toronto, exercise, read, cook and travel.

Laurie Baker,

lbaker@yorku.ca

My current research interests include the appearance and use of audio/visual technology by mega churches primarily in the southern United States. Amongst other aspects of ritual and religion, I am interested in looking at the ways that narratives of conversion are displayed via large screens at the head of the congregation and the affect this display may have on new attendees, sometimes referred to as seekers. The relationship between an affective and somatic religious engagement that is mediated through audio/visual technology figures prominently.

Heather Barnick,

hbarnick@yorku.ca

Currently, my intellectual interests circle around the anthropology of media, visual culture, and the intersections between science, technology, and the imagination. I am fascinated by the ways in which scientific narratives of “sensory systems” become templates for the hardware and software design of virtual spaces (simulators, video games, online Role Playing Games) which aim to train, condition, and captivate bodies. My PhD research at York University concentrates on Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) in Shanghai, China as sites of nation-building, pedagogy, and entertainment. As China attempts to grow its domestic online gaming industry, I am curious about how the processes and intended outcomes of game design transpire and transform in a variety of contexts including: universities, Internet entertainment providers, and among players themselves. As much as I think there is room for critical reflection of virtual gaming technologies, I am also a fan and so much of my “non-academic” time is spent playing World of Warcraft and keeping up to date with the latest news in Second Life.

Jessica Caporusso,

jesscapo@yorku.ca

Inspired by embodiment, sensation and affect, my research investigates pedagogies and practices of self-making in the context of audio engineering and sound recording in the Greater Toronto Area. I am particularly committed to exploring the establishment of multi-sensory ways of acquiring knowledge, through engaging modalities of the senses, affect and through phenomenological experience. My current research in sound production is principally concerned with various dimensions of performance, "serious play" and tacit knowledge. Other interests include science & technology studies, videogames and loitering in various Toronto bookstores and cafes.

Nelson Ferguson,

nfergus@yorku.ca

Nelson Ferguson is currently completing his dissertation which examines emerging circular labour migration patterns between the Atlantic Provinces and the Northern Alberta Oil Sands region. He has recently concluded a year of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in a former coal-mining town in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and in Fort McMurray, Alberta. During this period, he interacted with and spoke to long-distance commute workers, their families, community leaders, and members of industry in order to evaluate the impacts of this “commute” on family, community, and economy in both sending and receiving locales. Ferguson has also undertaken previous research on the lived experiences of Mexican migrant workers, living and working on a Southern Ontario farm and sojourning with migrant workers and their families in four Mexican villages. With interests in labour migration, neoliberalism, global changes in industrial relations, and, more generally, anthropological research methods, Ferguson has published and presented the results of his research projects on migrant agricultural workers and Atlantic Canada / Oil Sands long-distance commute workers in a variety of academic and policy-based forums.

Alicia Grimes,

amgrimes@yorku.ca

Alicia is a PhD student studying under the supervision of Shubhra Gururani. Currently in the San Francisco Bay area conducting fieldwork at TransFair USA, Alicia is exploring practices of fair trade certification and how they configure the terrains in which the fair trade movement in North America is negotiated through its consumer markets. Combining theoretical contributions from political economy of consumption and social audit literatures, her research also examines fair trade certification as an exercise in ethical and economic accounting, one rooted in wider political struggles over what makes consuming ‘fairly’ socially relevant in an era of intensified and accelerated global economic integration. Her extra-curricular interests include photography, dance, regular dental hygiene, and savouring a variety of delectable cheeses

Michael Connors Jackman,

samizdat@yorku.ca

My doctoral research focuses on the construction of queer publics, the politics of affect, and media activism in Canada. The project centers on the life of The Body Politic, a Toronto-based lesbian and gay liberation magazine published by Pink Triangle Press from 1971 until its folding in 1987. I am concerned with how people involved with the magazine remember the gay liberation movement, as well how they understand the transformation of queer politics since the 1970s. More broadly, I am interested in the territorialisation of desire and changing notions of queer community in the urban Canadian context.

Ryan James,

ryankj@yorku.ca

My doctoral dissertation “From ‘Slum Clearance’ to ‘Revitalization’: Fear, Hope, and Family Life in Toronto’s Social Housing, 1945-2012”, is an historical-ethnographic study of the transitioning social housing communities of Regent Park and Alexandra Park (both in Toronto) and the housing co-operatives that neighbour them. Through participant-observation fieldwork, life history interviews with people who grew up and/or raised children in these communities, and a discourse analysis of every mention of Regent Park in four newspapers from 1945 to the present, I look at how generations of social housing residents have challenged the idea that they constitute a social problem requiring state intervention, and how daily life has unfolded in these intentional communities designed according to state priorities of regulation and surveillance. I’ve also been part of fieldwork on faltering electrical service and social security in the Dominican Republic, and I’m planning future research on neighbourhood dynamics and uneven development in southwest Scarborough.

Siobhan McCollum,

mccollum@yorku.ca

Water security -indigeneity - gender. I began the PhD program in 2008, researching how identity politics help to secure access to scarce resources in the context of a struggle for safe water by Maya women in  Toledo District, Belize. I am interested in the co-construction of society and nature, and the political ecology of water in Central America and the Caribbean.  My MA work examined discourses of poverty in a Belizean village undergoing an abundance of development interventions, examining how villagers conceptualized poverty despite the textual representation of the entire village as "poor."

Rhiannon Mosher,

rmmosher@yorku.ca

Working under the supervision of Daphne Winland, I completed my fieldwork in Amsterdam, the Netherlands between August 2009 to August 2010. While some things have inevitably changed over the course of the fieldwork year, my research still investigates questions of nationalism, citizenship, autochthony, immigration, and integration in Amsterdam, and the contemporary Netherlands at large. Engaging with the views of people involved in volunteer networks, as well as participant observation of major public and national events, my research explores what it means to be ‘Dutch’ and how belonging is configured in the country today. When I’m not pondering important anthropological questions, I enjoy baking, 19th century English literature, and dreaming about returning to Amsterdam’s civilized biking culture, charming canal-side patios, and picturesque views.

Wesley Oakes,

wes123@yorku.ca

“They’re here, clandestine and on a single mission: to pull the rug from under us!!” Strangers, irregulars, kwerikewri, terrorist, mojados, scroungers, fobs, leaches, sans papier, degenerates, vucumpra, fanatics… are but a few of the xenophobic names used to describe unwanted immigrants.  It’s undeniable, the twenty-first century is experiencing increasing population movement with alarmist fears linking security and immigration. My current research raises several questions, like, how can anthropologist make sense of migrant experiences and public debates on pluralism and assimilation? My research takes forward academic debates on pluralism and explores the crossroads where
‘multicultural’ policy and implementation fracture. Moreover, it provides a
detailed analysis of the ways in which black Muslim youth in England negotiate their ethnic and racial identities in various hybrid urban localities and spaces. I’m interested in Islam and Islamophobia, youth, gang culture, race thinking and racism, diaspora, transnationalism, refugees and post 11 September 2001 discourses on security. I hold a BA in sociology and political science from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and MRes in anthropological research methods from the School of Oriental African Studies (SOAS). I'm a Graduate Fellow at the York Centre for Refugee Studies. I joined the PhD program in 2009.

Karen O’Connor,

koconnor@yorku.ca

My M.A. research explored the entanglement of multiple state and NGO bureaucracies during police raids against sex workers in Machala, Ecuador.  My current Ph.D. research considers how people remember transnational relationships while living with rolling blackouts, inflated bills, and accidental electrocutions due to wide-spread problems with privatized electrical services in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.  My current pastimes include talking and laughing with my new neighbours, eating quipes, and taking my daughter to the beach.

Jillian Ollivierre,

jilli@yorku.ca

I am interested in the South-South movements of goods, images and ideologies that connect India with the island of Trinidad in the Southern Caribbean.  There, Trinidadians, particularly but not exclusively those of Indian descent, consume a ‘modern,’ globalized and mediated ‘Indianness’  (especially in the form of ‘Bollywood’ film, film music and fashions) in ways that are complexly articulated to the island’s ethno-political context.  I am particularly interested in the gendered, sexualized and racialized implications of this consumption.   Located at anthropology’s critical intersection with Media Studies, Caribbean Studies and South Asian Studies, my work aims to contribute to a growing literature complicating dominant ‘West-to-rest’ framings of globalization in contemporary times.

Michelle Switzer,

mswitzer@yorku.ca

I’m currently conducting fieldwork in Mercedes, Soriano, Uruguay, where my research is focused on changes to rural life since the establishment of a foreign-owned pulp mill and eucalyptus plantations in the area over the last twenty years.  Specifically, I’m interested in the dialectical relationship between humans and their physical environment and how and why “nature” emerges as a site of resistance at the moment when the left-wing coalition has come to national power. Soriano department, an agriculture and ranching region in Uruguay’s interior, is currently home to 40,000ha of water-intensive plantation “forest,” which has impacted the way people live and work on the land and literally altered the region’s landscape. Broadly speaking, my research interests include environmental politics and development. I completed my B.A. and M.A. in Geography at Queen’s University (2001; 2005).  Prior to starting my studies at York, I worked as the Community Outreach and Communications Coordinator for a small Canadian international development agency with a regional focus in Mexico and Central America. When I’m not doing interviews or making farm visits, I enjoy drinking mate with friends, cheering for La Celeste, running an English conversation club, swimming with the Mercedes Masters’ team, and taking short trips to Montevideo to visit friends and lie on the beach.

Niki Thorne,

thornecs@yorku.ca

I believe in an engaged and critical anthropology, a radical, decolonizing anthropology—one that works to change the world, not just through observing, analyzing, or writing, but through concrete action.

I’m into activist research that works with post colonial social movements.  My masters project involved a prefigurative experiment in liberatory schooling (Hamilton FreeSkool), and my undergraduate field research looked at colonialism, racism, nationalism around the reclamation of Kanonhstaton.  Whenever possible, I combine my grounded, engaged anthropological research with my engagement and organizing in and with a variety of groups and communities.  I'm involved in Hamilton FreeSkool, CUPE 3903’s First Nations Solidarity Working Group, the Six Nations Solidarity Network, and more.

Most recently I’ve been thinking about power and the production of knowledge/silence, epistemic violence, as well as supporting, sustaining and building healthy communities and regional networks of resistance.  I also have a blog: curiouspraxis.wordpress.com

Karen Walmsley,

kangus@yorku.ca

Broadly speaking, I am interested in the affective and embodied dimensions of productions of scientific “knowledge”. My Masters degree, also undertaken at York University, explored sites of difference as they intersect with the affective aspects of dance.  My PhD research will expand on this by exploring these dimensions as they contribute to attempts to produce “human-like” artificial intelligence.  What is the template for thinking about humanity that is informing these efforts?  What kind of understandings of humanity are projected onto and derived from artificially intelligent beings?  How are these ideas transformed through processes of trial and error?  How are inequalities and categories of difference being reproduced and how are they being subverted in attempts to mechanically produce a human-like machine? As intelligence is commonly cited as the singular factor that separates humanity from non-human animals, I aim to glean insight from this project into the changing understandings of human cognition, and therefore, of humanity.

Amiee Whitefoot,

aimee1@yorku.ca

I joined the PhD program in 2005. Since then, I have become a mother to two little boys (2006, 2008) and have changed my field of interest from microcredit and international development issues, to a concern with the ways in which the breast pump is changing the ways mothers interpret and enact breastfeeding in their everyday lives. Specifically, my research asks: What are the biopolitics of the breast pump? How are women rethinking and renegotiating the classic dilemmas of motherhood through breast pump use? Have breast pumps depoliticised breastfeeding as a public policy issue? I plan to investigate the relationship between breast pumps being used by mothers to negotiate the demands of various kinds of work placed on them and how this relatively new biotechnology affects not only breastfeeding practices, but also the policies enacted to promote breastfeeding during upcoming fieldwork in southwestern Ontario. More broadly speaking, I am interested in the biopolitics of gender and reproduction, and the ways in which these two areas intersect (or don’t). Combining academia and motherhood is an ongoing challenge for me, but I am passionate about both and couldn’t imagine my life without either anthropology or my children.

Alex Wilson,

alexw@yorku.ca

My research interests include the symbolic urban landscape paying particular attention to the practice of “place/destination branding”. With Toronto as my primary site of analysis, I am interested in the multiple political and economic techniques used at both public and private levels to create a distinct and identifiable city “brand”. My current research considers the cultural and economic implications of the upcoming 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games hosted in the Greater Toronto Area. Theoretical concerns revolve around the perceived necessity of such a branding strategy as urban identities are re-articulated within a global discourse of neoliberalism.  Further, I am interested in the particular aspects of the city that are represented in the branding process and those left out of the picture altogether. My research also re-examines the notion of “city limits” taking into consideration the potential global breadth of the neoliberal city’s symbolic, cultural, political and economic landscapes. I am also a big Raptors fan…go Raps!

Michelle Wyndham-West,

mwywest@yorku.ca

I am a fourth year PhD student conducting an ethnographic study – across multiple “fields” – of Ontario’s tripartite health prevention policy for cervical cancer, including the HPV vaccine.  I am investigating the networks of public health policy. Networks function as a methodological tool to “follow” health policy narratives as they are developed across institutions; received, refuted or amalgamated by women in their everyday lives; and contested in everyday resistance and public advocacy.  Thus, I am examining the central notions of biological citizenship, risk and gender. In addition to pursuing my PhD, I spend most of my free time keeping up with our two boys.

Jaime Yard,

jdyard@yorku.ca

Jaime Yard is a doctoral candidate in the department of Anthropology at York University. Her dissertation in progress, "Interrupting Wilderness: Un-Settling the Social-Natural Landscape of British Columbia,” is an ethnography of the changing discursive and material construction of nature on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, an area undergoing a large-scale economic base shift from logging, fishing and mining to recreational/retirement property development.