The outstanding quality and diversity of our graduate students is one of our greatest strengths. Students come to York to be part of a welcoming and stimulating intellectual milieu, and through research, make knowledge count.
I am a PhD Candidate in social anthropology and a graduate associate at the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR). My research interests include feminist and queer theory, sexual violence, homonationalism, performance studies, settler colonialism, and the anthropology of race and racism. My doctoral research focuses on how homonationalist narratives are (re)produced, contested, and negotiated through staged performances in queer communities in Toronto.
Cameron Butler is a PhD student and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar. His doctoral research follows phosphate fertilizers through agribusiness value chains in southern Ontario. He explores how actors across the chains are responding to phosphorus becoming an object of rising public concern, particularly around the depletion of phosphate rock reserves and increasing eutrophication. His project combines economic anthropology theories of value and environmental anthropology theories of metabolic rift. His research interests include: human/more-than-human relations, political ecology, science and technology studies, queer ecology, anthropology of infrastructure, and food studies.
His publications can be on Google Scholar
Hana Ahmed is a PhD candidate and a SSHRC Fellowship holder. Her research explores how the Bangladeshi state discursively manufactures a range of governmental tools and technologies and deploys them for the management of ‘peace’ in the militarized area of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. In conversation with the scholarship on the anthropology of the state and bureaucracy, and the literature on the historical formation of indigenous people’s movements in postcolonial states, she looks at how various governmental documents become part of the production and articulation of ‘peace’. In Bangladesh she has worked as a journalist and human rights advocate.
My research considers the intersection of political ecology, science studies and the place of expertise in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the impact of colonial science and imperialism on the cultivation of western and non-western subjects. In particular, my dissertation explores the design and implementation of sustainable development projects in Mauritius, an island-nation in the Indian Ocean, and the influence of colonial-era green imperialism on which these current projects are imbricated. By this I mean to trace how colonial forms of expertise are legitimated and sustained over time—a practice that in turn seems to rely on the continuous (re)production of particular forms of knowledge-making practices. As such, my work is informed by past and contemporary transnational encounters that configure connections between environment, expertise and knowledge exchange. Alongside my doctoral research, I am also a graduate associate of the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR).
My dissertation research explores the emotional lives of student teachers in southern France. My fieldwork, conducted during the 2014-2015 school year, included working at a the local teachers’ college, visiting primary and secondary school classrooms, and interviewing teachers around the region. More broadly, I am interested in the ideas of state secularism, emotional labour, and citizenship and belonging. I am currently a research assistant with the Globally Networked Learning Project at York, a graduate diploma student in German & European Studies, and a graduate affiliate of the City Institute at York University. I am on leave for the 2017-2018 academic year.
Inspired by the cross-cultural mothering experiences I had when my first child was born, I enrolled in the inter-university master’s program in Women and Gender Studies at Dalhousie University to learn how migrant women negotiated their identifications; their beliefs, values and practices of rearing and socializing children; and how they negotiated the social, cultural, economic and political environment in which they settled. I am interested in expanding upon these questions to unravel how migrant mother’s social and cultural identities are marked, articulated and transformed while crossing national and provincial boundaries; how they, as social agents, negotiate their social, cultural and political positioning as well as their civic participation within multiple spaces as women and as mothers. I am also interested in further understanding the ways in which women’s maternal practice, as a form of bodily performance, may contribute to opening gaps for new forms of individual and groups identities and hybrid cultures.
Marion Lougheed is a PhD candidate who is researching (trans)nationalism, identity, citizenship and belongings among students at an international high school in Germany. She received her MA from Simon Fraser University (supervisor Dr. Jie Yang) and her BA(Hons.) from Memorial University (supervisor Dr. Robin Whitaker).
I received my M.A in Social Anthropology from McMaster University in 2012 before coming to York to continue my studies in the discipline. My interests are broad and include popular/urban spaces, performance, identity, and play. My M.A research explored the circulation of “politically correct” discourses and its intersection with the growing demand for racially-based stand-up comedy in the city of Toronto. Focusing on performers and audience members in comedy clubs, I examined the ways these discourses were discussed, reinterpreted, expressed and consumed and the implications this had for addressing racism within Canada. I am currently interested in further exploring unconventional sites of expression and their capacity for people to create personal and collective feelings of connection. Specifically, I aim to understand how sexual minorities in South Korea use emerging digital technologies, such as dating applications, to carve out spaces of intimacy within Korean society. Through this proposed research I ask whether the affective dimensions of intimacy are being mediated between the online and offline worlds as people perform their sexual identity and what impact will these new platforms provide regarding personal and collective feelings of belonging in Korean society.
Interests and specializations: Sexuality, Gender, Queerness, Identity, New Technology, Media, Political anthropology.
Cultural Areas: Québec, Online Communities, Western subcultures, Polynesia, Indigeneity.
PhD: Indigenous Queerness (Two-spirit and LGBTQ+) in urban contexts in Québec and its inclusions in non-indigenous LGBTQ+ communities.
Nicolas Côté-Saucier is a Québécois anthropologist specialized in Queer Anth., Gender and Sexualities Studies as well as Political Anth., New Technologies and Media Anth., and Online Ethnography. He also has completed a certificate in Indigenous Studies and studied Decolonialism and Postcolonialism.
His M.A. was on Discourse and Narratives in Barebackers’ online communities. He also worked on Drag Queens/Kings, Indigenous uses and appropriation of New Technologies, transnational sexualities, Queer activism and queer policies, BSDM discourse and practices, and many more.
My work centers on transnational commercial surrogacy and assisted reproduction, specifically in Russia. I am interested in how surrogacy constitutes—and is constituted by—diverse relations of gender, capitalist exchange, and waste in the unique neoliberal context of post-Soviet Russia, and how these relations are negotiated and understood by diverse actors. My work is informed by scholarships of medicine and kinship, feminist interventions in the study of reproduction, capitalism and neoliberalism, and theories of waste and discard. Aside from my academic pursuits, I am also an avid knitter, rock climber, and practitioner instructor of Taoist Tai Chi.
I am a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at York University. My research takes place at the intersection of sociocultural anthropology and science and technology studies. Interested in energetic economies, speculation and the materiality of data and virtual technologies. My current research project examines how a large data centre located outside of Paris, France recycles waste heat from computer servers and uses this heat to power an arboretum. Inside the arboretum researchers experiment on plants that are meant to survive climate change thus speculating on future environmental conditions. Prior to beginning my PhD I completed a M.A. in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
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The Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at York is an exciting environment to pursue innovative, socially engaging, career-ready education. Contact our Graduate Program Assistant to learn more.