Allison Odger, PhD
Allison Odger, PhD
Dr. Odger is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of Health Sciences Education at McGill University for the 2022–2023 year.
The focus of her research project was a single sexual health organization in downtown Toronto, Ontario. Created in the 1970s by a feminist collective of immigrant women, it had been a pioneering force in the history of the women’s health movement, by providing free, accessible, empowering, and culturally sensitive sexual health care, initially to immigrant women and eventually to Canadian-born women and men. Allison conducted participant observation at the main clinic and aboard their mobile bus which travelled across the Greater-Toronto-Area. She interviewed sexual health social actors (counsellors, physicians, sexual health promoters, executive directors, volunteers, and clients) to better understand how sexual health care education and services operate across the city. She identified two central tensions. The first was between governance and empowerment. Sexual health social actors were both invested in biomedical understandings of sexual health while also envisioning it done differently by valuing choice, bodily autonomy, and agency. The second tension Allison observed was between care and surveillance, and how they inseparability operated in sexual health care. Another key observation in her work has to do with the importance of ‘performing via good metrics’ (i.e the number of clients seen and how many services were provided); this emphasis on counting intimately shaped the practices of the clinic.
Sarah Yusuf, PhD Candidate
Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic has always held a special place in my heart. It has hosted our family vacations, it is where I learned to dance bachata, it has witnessed the sunburns, the indulgences, and the days spent relaxing under the swaying fronds of palm trees that decorate the beautiful beaches. As a tourist, you pursue that “something more,” you seek to capture a story, a photo, a souvenir of sorts to prove you were “there.” My research traces this idea of the “something more,” but is angled differently, exploring how local encounters with and within the touristic milieu can look and feel while caught up in the overwhelming presence and power of Carnival Cruises – Puerto Plata’s new cruise ship tourism endeavour. Informed by affect theory, this research draws on “haunting” as a way to speak through the ways power makes itself felt, throwing into stark relief the structures of power that reach across time and space to make themselves known in the present. In the field, I spoke with those who found themselves caught up in the cruise ship tourism milieu. These conversations traced their personal experiences, their dreams, nightmares, frustrations, and hopes, often taking us in directions that didn’t lead to anywhere in particular but to an attempt to make sense of it all, of the way events unfolded. I paid close attention to what people said and when, their bodily dispositions, the restraints, the embellishments, the ways the tourism frame worked on people, and the ways people worked on the tourism frame.
Sarah Yusuf
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