_{Photo of Eric Mykhalovskiy}

Somewhat unexpectedly, an opportunity arose to work with George Smith, one of the founding members of AAN!, on a large research project about access to social services for people living with HIV. I jumped at the chance to become involved. George and I developed a mentor-apprentice relationship; I was the community researcher person on the project.

At the very beginning of the project, George said to me: “There is one condition for your participation in this research: you must not challenge the research method”. The method, I learned, was institutional ethnography (IE), an approach to sociology developed by Dorothy Smith. The approach emphasizes how what Smith calls the “relations of ruling” are put together through people’s activities, particularly as they are mediated across time and place by texts.

Through doing IE in the project and my mentorship with George, I learned about a new kind of sociology. This research project gave me an entry point for thinking about sociology in a less alienating way and I felt there was an opportunity to return to the academy.

George didn’t have a PhD, and although he was widely respected, he knew that there were disadvantages to working without that credential. “With a PhD,” he emphasized, “you will be able to do things you would not be able to do otherwise. You will have a level of academic capital and credibility that will mean your work has the chance to be taken up seriously.” He urged me to use the PhD to support the kind of political work that I thought important.

Unfortunately, George died of HIV-related complications in 1994, before the project finished.

In a book chapter you wrote with Kathryn Church, “Of t-shirts and ontologies: Celebrating George Smith’s pedagogical legacies” , you observe that student activists may not want to do institutional ethnography because they may prefer to study social movements rather than the institutional relations movements struggle against. There are limits to such a focus, you suggest. Can you explain what you mean?

It is not that studying activism is more or less important than studying ruling relations–but there is a difference. There is a way that the training that prevails in sociology, especially at �첥��Ƶ, creates an emphasis on theory as an almost apex practice for sociologists and, with it, expectations that one’s research proceeds from the conceptual preoccupations of a recognized body of scholarly literature. In my experience, students with an interest in activism often turn to the social movement literature as a conceptual guide and take up social movements as the object of their analytic attention. Certainly, a lot of important activist scholarship takes this form.

By contrast, institutional ethnographers—and George lays this out in his article on political activist ethnography[1]—begin their work in the standpoint of everyday experience and focus their attention on the institutional relations that social movements confront. In a sense, we study the large-scale problems movements are grappling with.  Rather than study movement strategies or tactics we try to understand how ruling relations are put together so that they can be challenged and transformed.  This means that when you take up IE, you are in a different relationship to the movement—you’re not studying the movement—you’re almost in a kind of service relationship, because you are trying to help activists understand ruling practices that they confront and challenge.

My point is not that taking up IE to do research about ruling relations is better than research on or about social movement activism. Instead, there are different politics and ways of doing research that connect with what questions you are trying to address. I think it’s important for student to ask themselves: How am I related to the movement? How do I orient to creating knowledge with, about, or for the movement?

You have written and, in this interview, spoken about George Smith’s formative influence. He had said to you “don’t challenge me on the method.” Why was he so insistent on the centrality of institutional ethnography? Why did this matter so much for the aims of the project?

There are many schools of sociology and institutional ethnography is one of them. What distinguishes IE is that it is a method informed by a strong feminist and historical materialist theoretical underpinning. There is a way to do IE, which is very different from other schools where there may be a shared theoretical approach but without a unified methodological commitment.

Substantively, a lot of social science research on HIV at the time George and I conducted our study, objectified people.  Scholars were studying the identities of people living with HIV, their suffering, and how they created meaning in and through their experiences of illness. George wanted to do something different. As an institutional ethnography, the study didn’t treat people living with HIV as an object of inquiry. Instead, it began with their experiences and active “work” as a way into exploring the social and institutional processes that shaped their access to social services. In establishing IE as the method, he established the boundaries of our work.

Do you think IE leads to particularly productive scholarship for activists trying to bring about social change? What other approaches have you found useful?

As I mentioned, in the 1990s, there was a lot of extractive research being done about HIV. When I was working at AAN!, researchers would come into our office with their studies they wanted to do: they would plop down their surveys, ask us to find research participants, take what they needed, and be gone. As George was practicing institutional ethnography, he promised something different: we would produce knowledge for communities, knowledge that would be in service of people’s concerns.

But that is where you have to be careful not to oversell. When you are doing research, the whole point is that you do not know what you will find. If you knew, you would not have to do the research. Maybe nothing will come out of your inquiry. When an IE or other study is community-based, you want to be honest with that community about what you hope the research will accomplish and the reality that it may not accomplish as much as you hope.   

The general promise of IE is important: the aim is to produce knowledge about how institutions and systems work, because once you know how they work you can try to change and remake them. In this way, IE is good for producing knowledge based on people’s experiences that can transform the institutional practices to which they are subject. For example, there has been some fantastic institutional ethnographic work done in the U.S. on how domestic violence is processed through the police and court systems. It has led to organizational changes that build women’s safety into how domestic violence is dealt with.[2] Social inquiry, done right and in the right mix of circumstances, can make a difference, even if you cannot promise that at the outset of any research project.

Some activists see the university as an ivory tower, as a place that is not very useful to them, because it is preoccupied with scholarly questions that are less important to community activists. How might you answer activists who see the university in this way?

Certainly, in activist circles, scholarly publications may be viewed as careerist or esoteric. And academic work can be like that! But scholarly research can be very meaningful for activists, depending on the politics scholars engage with and articulate with their academic work.

A good deal of the Canadian research on HIV criminalization has been influenced by IE.  People have been looking at intersecting relations of criminal law and public health from a scholar-activist standpoint and concern for criminal law reform. Early on in that work, we researched criminal cases and determined that people living with HIV with negligible or no risk of HIV transmission were being charged with aggravated sexual assault for HIV non-disclosure.  This, among other factors, led us to be very critical of the use of the criminal law. As researchers and as activists we mobilized our communities and reached out to authorities of various sorts, including politicians, about the need for change.

To try to convince politicians, research was needed that provided evidence related to HIV criminalization. The results of that work have made a difference. First, “hard” science produced evidence that, with successful treatment, people living with HIV posed zero risk of HIV transmission. The Canadian Consensus Statement on HIV and its Transmission in the Context of Criminal Law[3] has been extremely important in establishing this fact and activists have been able to take this evidence to parliamentarians and lawmakers to limit the reach of the criminal law. Second, Canadian researchers have produced a knowledge base about the implications of HIV criminalization for HIV prevention, showing that far from supporting public health, criminalization hinders it.[4] That type of evidence needs to be published in the highest impact scholarly journal you can get, because – whether it should matter or not – being published in highly ranked journals matters to people in power.

Scholarly work can be critical to the persuasive work that is required to inform and change criminal law. We created a body of evidence, and we brought it to lawyers, to court proceedings, and ultimately to the politicians that make and unmake law.

George Smith told you to make the most of your PhD. How do you assess your contributions, as you look back on what is now several decades of scholarly work?

I think my most important contributions have centered on HIV criminalization. There, I can say: yes, my research has made a difference for the better.

Since 2007, when we founded the Ontario Working Group on HIV Criminalization, I’ve worked on this issue politically and in research. There have been many activities—organizing, engaging communities, going to meetings, endless emails, conducting research, writing and publishing, bringing researchers together, mentoring emerging scholars, lobbying politicians—that have added to that political work over a long period of time.

In my experience, academic research does not contribute to quick, direct transformation. My experience is that change takes place over time and not alone but in collaboration. In my case, I have been working with extraordinarily creative and thoughtful lawyers, human rights advocates, people living with HIV, health care providers, and people interested in public health– together –to figure out how to intervene in HIV criminalization. Having a PhD has meant being able to produce research and using that research to shift community perspectives, in meetings with Members of Provincial Parliament, when providing expert testimony in legislative hearings, and before parliamentary committees exploring the issue.

In those respects, not alone, but with other like-minded people, I have tried to realize the spirit of political activist ethnography.  

*Santbir Singh, PhD student in Sociology, prepared questions for the workshop on which this text is based. Charlotte Smith, PhD student in Sociology, took notes and provided the original edit for the article. Professor Elaine Coburn is responsible for final edits along with Professor Eric Mykhalovskiy.

References

[1] Smith, G. W. (1990). Political activist as ethnographer. Social problems. 37(4), 629-648.

[2] Pence, E. (2001). Safety for battered women in a textually mediated legal system. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 7(2), 199-229.

[3] Loutfy, M., Tyndall, M., Baril, J. G., Montaner, J. S., Kaul, R., & Hankins, C. (2014). Canadian consensus statement on HIV and its transmission in the context of criminal law. Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology, 25(3), 135-140.

[4] Hastings, C., French, M., McClelland, A., Mykhalovskiy, E., Adam, B., Bisaillon, L., ... & Wilson, C. (2024). Criminal Code reform of HIV non-disclosure is urgently needed: Social science perspectives on the harms of HIV criminalization in Canada. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 115(1), 8-14.

_{Photo of Amanda van Beinum}

What are your main areas of interest and how did you move into this area of social inquiry?

I continue to be interested in using social science approaches to study health, healthcare, and medicine. Having spent several years working and doing research in the intensive care unit, one of my current areas of focus is on the development and use of technologies as part of medical practice. At present, my work focuses on neurotechnologies, electronic devices which interface with the brain either directly or indirectly. These devices are being tested for various clinical and commercial applications ranging from treatment of mental illness to assisting people with paralysis to trans-humanist techno-enhancement. The overarching question driving my research across several different projects is to figure out whether and how neurotechnology can promote human empowerment without contributing to widening inequalities in health and social status.

Another major area of focus which emerges from my work in critical posthuman theory is a project on the use of antibiotics in agriculture. This interdisciplinary project examines biosecurity practices on farms and their impacts on planetary health, as well as potential policy implications of re-imagining antibiotic use in farming through a relational ecology lens. The overarching question driving this research work is both theoretical and practical and centers around understand how critical posthumanism can be used to drive material changes in the applied world of agriculture.

How do you work and get writing done amidst competing responsibilities as an academic who teaches and undertakes service work, as well as scholarship?

I have built a habit of writing every work day for at least 30 minutes. I start my most productive period of the day with writing, which ensures that I make time for this important part of my work with a clear and focused mind. I set and track quarterly goals, which helps me to remain focused on larger projects instead of getting buried in smaller tasks.  I am also adamant about the need for rest. Combined with my family caregiving responsibilities this means that I try not to work on weekends, and I take regular dedicated vacation time to disconnect. I have found that I can do more in 2 hours when I am well rested and have clear goals than with a full day when I am burnt out and lacking direction.

I like to think about big writing projects like making a sculpture, where the shape and the details only come together as part of the process of working with the material. There are so many ways to communicate ideas, and it is very satisfying when the final figure of a project becomes clear. Thinking about writing as shaping a tangible, applied contribution to a better understanding of the world makes it into a very satisfying as well as creative activity.   

What do you like about being a sociologist — and an interdisciplinary scholar?

My favorite thing about being a sociologist and interdisciplinary scholar is that pretty much any topic can be studied. Everything in the world, from farming to medical technologies, interacts with social relations in a multitude of ways. Some of these have been well studied in the social science world and new things can be understood by bringing them into conversation with ongoing work in science and medicine. Sometimes issues are just emerging in the science and medicine world and haven’t yet been discussed in the social sciences – again, bringing these two fields into contact can reveal a whole new area of questions and social implications. My work has taken me into laboratories, board rooms, grazing fields, medical clinics, conference halls, hospital wards, milking parlours, and of course many classrooms. I love having a job that allows me to continue to learn about the world so broadly, to work with many different types of people, and to share interdisciplinary insights with others.

What advice would you give to early career academics/PhD students?

My advice would be to focus on skills development. Skills like developing a research project, collecting and analyzing data, writing, presenting results, working with others, and teaching are valuable across different sectors and will allow you to pivot to different opportunities that arise. The specific sociological skills of being able understand and analyze the world through social relations, characteristics, and distributions of power will be useful in many different places. Finding work in academia requires flexibility – you may end up working in a department or academic-adjacent position which requires your skills more so than your content expertise. This flexibility not only opens doors to diverse career paths but also allows you to find meaningful and rewarding work that draws on the core strengths of sociological inquiry—making a real impact by understanding and engaging with the complexities of society.

_{Photo of Stefan Treffers}

After a year of working a retail job, I decided to pursue a Master’s Degree and after applying to several schools, I settled on the University of Windsor. My choice was influenced, in large part, by Windsor’s proximity to Detroit, a city with a rich social and political history and, in 2013, in the midst of profound changes, heading towards municipal bankruptcy. I didn’t appreciate the full breadth of Detroit’s fiscal crisis and restructuring until years later when I made it my dissertation topic at �첥��Ƶ.

Windsor is where my sociological imagination was first sparked. There, I took a keen interest in diverse topics including urban inequality, addiction, policing, and surveillance.

Windsor is where my sociological imagination was first sparked. There, I took a keen interest in diverse topics including urban inequality, addiction, policing, and surveillance. Many of the sociological questions I was interested in, and still think about, were inspired by my back-to-back reading of Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis and Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor and their studies of the legacies of urban poverty, racial inequality, and urban restructuring that continue to shape urban policy in the United States.

I was accepted into the doctoral program at �첥��Ƶ, and once here, I intended to study municipal bond markets and bankruptcy. I hoped to better understand the events that had unravelled in Detroit and other cities that were facing deepening fiscal distress. By far, coursework provided the most socially fulfilling part of the PhD. I took the opportunity to take courses outside of the Sociology department, as well, including a transfer credit in a geography course at the University of Toronto under Professor Jason Hackworth, whose work I really admired.

Research Assistantships… introduced me to academic publishing and helped cultivate strong working relationships with professors in and outside of the department. They also helped to pay the bills!

While I enjoyed my short time as a teaching assistant in my first year, I was more comfortable with research assistantships (RAs). Ultimately, these RAships introduced me to academic publishing and helped cultivate strong working relationships with professors in and outside of the department. They also helped to pay the bills! I also joined the City Institute at York, and became affiliated with a research cluster based in the United Kingdom -- both proved vital to maintaining social interaction with other academics when the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2019, and during the subsequent lockdowns.

The dissertation phase of the PhD is a time of intense work and solitude, but this dedicated period of study does not have to come at the expense of a vibrant and healthy balance between work and play! Maintaining this balance was a constant battle for me, but my best days were those when I fell back into a routine of movement, sunshine, play, and social time with my partner, friends, and family.

Maintaining balance [between work and play] was a constant battle for me, but my best days were those when I fell back into a routine of movement, sunshine, play, and social time with my partner, friends, and family.

As I look towards the future, the prospects of a tenured career in academia look increasingly scarce. This trend was already apparent years ago. Given the context, my outlook has been see to my PhD -- Liberty and Security in an Austere City: Security Politics and Urban Restructuring in Post-Bankruptcy Detroit --as a lucky opportunity to intensely study a subject I care about for several years. The world is constantly changing, brimming with opportunities for sociological inquiry! I’m excited to explore potential careers where I can continue to cultivate my sociological curiosity and imagination.

Written by Stefan Treffers. Treffers completed his PhD in Sociology at �첥��Ƶ in January 2025.

_{Photo of Professor Wendy Geniusz}

The language program at the University of Minnesota went on seasonal field trips to Ontario where students were immersed in culture and some language. We went wild ricing, attended winter storytelling sessions, and went trapping. The connections I made with the elders and knowledge keepers on these trips helped me as I began doing interviews for my dissertation. I also made connections while working on Ojibwe l language projects in my future husband’s community.

My dissertation was very much a family and community affair. Even before I finished my PhD, my mother decided that she would write a book, too. She actually said, “Oh good, I’ll write one too.”  She finished before me!  

My dissertation and later my book, Our Knowledge is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings, published in 2009, filled holes in people’s knowledge. To me, it is a “background” book, explaining basic principles, like interconnectedness and why we have responsibilities to all living beings.  My mother’s book, Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings (2015) was not immediately published. Ironically, once I had my PhD, I could be listed as the editor and my university credentials meant that my mother’s words were suddenly credible.

[M]y book, Our Knowledge is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings filled holes in people’s knowledge…it is a “background” book, explaining basic principles, like interconnectedness and why we have responsibilities to all living beings.

Part of editing my mother’s book meant learning more Ojibwe plant names.  I went back and forth between written sources and first language Ojibwe speakers throughout the Great Lakes Region.  I spoke with people I knew from various Ojibwe language projects I was working on, and I would verify the written sources against the authority of the oral knowledge keepers…and go back and forth, like that. Often, in written sources, names were misused and so it meant correcting mistakes. There were also plant names that were not recorded in any written source, but which the elders knew. 

Chi-mewinzha: Ojibwe Stories from Leech Lake, which I co-edited with Brendan Fairbanks (now Kishketon), came about because Dorothy Whipple, an elder and first language Ojibwe speaker, and I were on language learning projects. After she lost her hearing, she wanted to write her stories down.

Before finishing my PhD, I signed a contract to become a tenure track assistant professor at Minnesota State-University.  I finished my PhD about a month before my contract started.  It is not easy to be a professor in the United States because there professors are, usually, only paid nine months of the year.  Some professors leave signs on their doors addressed to anyone looking for them in the summer : “I am only on a 9 month contract, and not paid during the summer.”  There were many faculty I worked with who had to do odd jobs, or temporarily move for work in the summer.   It took a lot of effort to survive over the summer, when I was not on the payroll. Sometimes I would move in with my mom, because I could not afford to live where I was and I always racked up a lot of credit card debt -- and that was how I made it until I came to �첥��Ƶ.

Like everyone else [in American academia], I was only paid nine months in my previous job. It was a lot of effort to survive over the summer, when I was not on the payroll.

The position advertised here was for a “Professor of Decolonization, Indigeneity and Sociology” -- and I knew the first two parts! I knew some of the people who were working here at York, for instance, Professors Deborah MacGregor and Alan Corbière. My goal in coming was to work with them.

I had never taught a graduate class before coming here. I really enjoy teaching graduate students at York. It’s nice to engage in intellectual conversations and you can talk more  -- and more in depth -- with graduate students about the approaches to the readings, what makes sense, what should be challenged, and what they think about it all. There is more diversity at York than I had previously experienced.

There is more diversity at York than I had previously experienced. At  York, it’s cool to talk to people, faculty and students, with varied experiences. There are more Indigenous students here…. I can write and teach, and it’s nice to be able to go back and forth on ideas in contemporary Indigenous theory.

It’s great to get paid for the whole year. Now I feel like I have a fellowship every summer!  I was teaching four days a week, that was not even a teaching stream appointment – this is how we teach languages. There was not a lot of time to do other things. Now I can talk to other scholars about Indigenous theory and methodologies. I can write and teach, and it’s nice to be able to go back and forth on ideas in contemporary Indigenous theory.

There is not a lot of separation between my life and my scholarship. When I was very young, my mother already had her BA and we were going to continuing education classes together and working independently with Ojibwe elders. It made sense to me that I would get a PhD and be part of revitalizing Indigenous languages and cultures. I have always lived my research, my family has always joined me in this, and I can’t really imagine it any other way.

_{Photo of Professor Wesley Crichlow}

�첥��Ƶ Professors Livy Visano… and the late Evelyn Kallen…impressed me as being very practical in their approach to social justice praxis, so their example of balancing scholarship and community activism helped me to understand that there was a place for me in the university.

Later, I did my Masters in Education, in the 1980s, when, quite unusually for the times, I was interested in rap music and how it might be used to support pedagogy. I was volunteer teaching at Lord Dufferin public school in Regent park, and students were dealing with a lot in their lives. To me, it was obvious that we could learn a lot from Tupac Shakur. He asks, “Did you hear about the rose that grew/from a crack in the concrete?”. Shakur (1999) refers to young people, who, despite social stressors and structural barriers, are “roses that grow” from concrete. He reminds us to dream, to thrive – especially for those who, without nurturing supports for growth, still bloom.

When [Tupac Shakur] asks, ‘Did you hear about the rose that grew/from a crack in the concrete?”… [h]e reminds us to dream, to thrive-- especially for those who, without nurturing supports for growth, still bloom.

“In focussing my Masters in Education on rap music,” Dr. Crichlow observes, “I was bringing in anti-racism and critical pedagogy through progressive forms of the rap genre. In the classroom, rap helped to make sense of social issues that students were raising about the particularity of challenges that they faced.” I realized that I could do scholarship and teach in ways that made sense to me and to my students. I could bring in Black experience and reinvent what critical Black pedagogy meant so that it was relevant to our lives. At the same time, I realized that teaching was not just about learning lessons with students. “I learned” Dr. Crichlow remarks, “that teaching was a calling, a vocation.”

After finishing my Masters, I completed my PhD at the Ontario Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. My thesis became the first-ever study of Black men who love and have sexual relationships with other men. This was published as a book, Buller Men and Batty Bwoys: Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities, in 2004. “Implicitly, it was a critique of white Eurocentric LGBTQ politics,” Dr. Crichlow explains.

 “It was Black gay research that restored Caribbean and diasporic Caribbean indigenous terms; these terms represent relationships.” As indigenous terms, Dr. Crichlow argues, Buller Men and Batty Bwoy locate men within social relationships that enact a definition of the culture and community of Caribbean people. Their identifications are imparted through the language and culture, including distinctive body gestures, that privilege, maintain and occasionally contest values central to Caribbean culture. This remains an important intervention, since far too often whiteness overdetermines queerness, while Blackness, by default, overdetermines compulsory heterosexuality.

As indigenous terms, Dr. Crichlow argues, Buller Men and Batty Bwoy locate men within social relationships that enact a definition of the culture and community of Caribbean people. Their identifications are imparted through the language and culture, including distinctive body gestures, that privilege, maintain and occasionally contest values central to Caribbean culture.

Alongside my scholarship, I took other initiatives. “I never wanted simply to publish about people’s oppression” Dr. Crichlow observes, “because that seemed to me unethical. I was writing about oppression to bring about change.” I established A Different Booklist, while still a PhD student, because I wanted to create a Black LGBTQ cultural center and bookstore where you could read Caribbean and African Canadian literature, from both small and big presses.

Later, I was part of the efforts to advance the African Canadian legal clinic, one of the specialist legal clinics serving specific community needs in Ontario. This was started in the aftermath of what were called “riots” but were better described as disturbances on Yonge Street, in the aftermath of the Rodney King murder by police office, in the United States in 1991 and the rash of anti-Blackness impacting Black in education, criminal justice, mental health and employment sectors. The African Canadian legal clinic started to take up some of these test cases, all the way to the Supreme Court. This was a way, very practically, of challenging the normalcy of anti-Black racism employing critical race theory, legal storytelling, and critical race litigation to achieve racial equality and eradicate antiblackness.

Police brutality [is] just as much a problem in Canada [as it is in the United States], so the African legal clinic started to take up these cases, all the way to the Supreme Court.

Today, I am pursuing a project very near to my heart. “I put forward the same project for funding for many years” Dr. Crichlow observes. “It was finally funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 2022”. The funding supported a survey and interviews with Black gay, bisexual, and trans men who had been incarcerated.

A major outcome of that project is our current effort, including with my esteemed �첥��Ƶ faculty colleague -- and friend -- Dr. Elaine Coburn who is equally committed to the project, alongside many others. Together, we are creating a Black LGBTQ Justice national non-profit. As Dr. Crichlow explains, “Black LGBTQ Justice will advocate for and support Black LGBTQ people who have been impacted by the justice system.” Too often, this community is totally invisible within supportive organizations meant to help those negatively, often violently, impacted by their encounters with the justice system.

“What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be free? And how can I describe human life with enough clarity, to begin to speak to our yearning for emancipation and freedom?” This is the driving concern for my scholarship and for my activism.

“This is the kind of work that I find meaningful as a scholar-activist,” Dr. Crichlow concludes. “It is work that asks: How do I do more than document and publish oppression?  In other words, how do I not steal people’s pain and suffering? How do we centre the voices of those who are otherwise marginalized?” But most of all, Dr. Crichlow argues, this work asks of each of us: “What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be free? And how can I describe human life with enough clarity, to begin to speak to our yearning for emancipation and freedom?” This is the driving concern for my scholarship and for my activism. I have tried to live out these commitments in my academic commitments and in responding to community needs, at the intersection of our lives.

Dr. Crichlow, �첥��Ƶ alumni and Ontario Tech faculty member, was hosted by the Research Centre for Public Sociology and the Graduate Programme in Sociology on March 10, 2025.

_{Photo of Professor Philip Walsh}

In the United Kingdom, Oxford and Cambridge set the standard for many universities, but Warwick sought to be different. The kind of scholarship at the Department of Sociology was quite radical and strongly theoretical, very much  influenced by philosophy. My PhD, which I  finished in 1999, was on the history of scepticism in philosophy, under the supervision of a scholar of Georg Hegel, Gillian Rose, who was appointed in the Sociology programme. The work was historical, from sceptics in ancient Greece to late 19th and early 20th century. I was  interested in how later thinkers in the Frankfurt school, notably Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, arrived at their positions and were influenced by long philosophical traditions of scepticism, all while responding to the particular historical and social conditions of their times. My thesis later was published, as a book, Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory (2005), focussing on Hegel’s role in shaping the Frankfurt school.

I was interested in how later thinkers, in the Frankfurt school, notably Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, arrived at their positions and were influenced by long philosophical traditions of scepticism, all while responding to the particular historical and social conditions of their times.

Immediately after I finished my PhD, Britain brought in a new research evaluation process, where programmes were ranked based on the number of publications each produced. This was a very difficult period because no-one was prepared to hire new Ph.Ds who had not published. Fortunately,  I had permanent residency in the United States and there, I found a position as an adjunct in a community college for two years. The community colleges are devalued, likely because the students who attended could not get into university. The college I taught in, Tompkins County Community College, was in rural upstate New York and I taught a range of courses,  including criminology. Many of the students had a connection with a juvenile detention centre, in the area, and the teaching was quite difficult.

Then, at one of the State University of New York (SUNY Cortland) colleges in New York, where I had another adjunct position, a sociological theory position opened up. Perhaps because they already knew me and felt that I was a good teacher – I am not sure I was, at the time, but I was not a problematic teacher – they hired me. The students were mostly middle-class students, many of them were athletes, they were disciplined and they were serious about their studies. Before I was hired, the Regents at SUNY mandated that all students had to take a course in United States civics. Since I was the newest faculty member, I taught the class with a strong historical lens -- and, as I discovered then and since, when you teach a subject you do not know much about, you learn a lot.

[A]s I discovered then and since, when you teach a subject you do not know  much about, you learn a lot.

Shortly after taking up this position,  incumbent United States President, George W. Bush was re-elected. At the time, I had a young family, so I asked myself: “Do I  want to be in the United States?” A position was advertised at York university,  in sociological theory. I did not think I  would get the job -- but I did. �첥��Ƶ was quite an intimidating place: it is a huge campus, and, of course,  I had never lived in Canada. Ever since, I  have been doing my research and teaching here, continuing to work in the fields of sociological theory and the theories of knowledge.

I have a particular interest in the work of Hannah Arendt and Norbert Elias, among others. This scholarship led to the publication of another book, Arendt Contra Sociology: Theory, Society and its Science  (2015), in which I argued that although Arendt is usually thought of as a political theorist, she has critical insights for sociologists. Right now, I am working on another book, The Reality of Knowledge, that explores the sociology of knowledge from a critical realist perspective. Others write faster but for me, a book takes about ten years to write.

Academic life today does not allow for long periods of writing, uninterrupted, so I write in spasms. To pursue an idea I  have to write every single day and follow the idea – I need a sustained period of time, so that I write every single day. Other people may work differently; it is very  individual. I tend to “chunk” my writing. Right now, I am writing a section where  I am trying to clarify what a particular author means by agency, for instance, so I write to clarify what is being said but also critique it -- to refine this particular concept of agency. That might take me a week, working three or four hours a day. Once I have a fully worked out chapter,  I send it to my editor, who is a former PhD student. She is helpful, because she both  knows this area but she is distant enough that she can look at it in a new way.

Academic life today does not allow for long periods of writing, uninterrupted, so I write in spasms. To pursue an idea  I have to write every single day and follow the idea – I need a sustained period of time, so that I write every single day.

 Most of my work is theoretical, but I  recently published a more specialized article in the sociology of emotions, personhood and social ontology. I was teaching the sociology of emotions and felt I needed to know the area better. But it felt unfamiliar: “I don’t know these people.  I don’t know this vocabulary.” Sociological theory and the sociology of knowledge, my main areas, are more obviously complementary.

When I ask myself what I know, after several decades in this profession, it is about finding balance. To enjoy the role of a scholar and teacher, you must like your own company. You spend a lot of time writing and preparing for teaching, so you need to be able to commune with yourself. At the same time, when you teach, you need to be sociable, so that you can connect with others. For me, a key to enjoying life as a professor is cultivating both this enjoyment of being alone, writing and reading, and being sociable, especially for teaching. Another lesson I have learned is that no single plan is enough. Rather, you remain open-minded and look for opportunities.

To enjoy the role of a scholar and teacher, you must like your own company. You spend a lot of time writing and preparing for teaching, so you need to be able to commune with yourself. At the same time, when you teach, you need to be sociable, so that you can connect with others.

The landscape is changing. When I finished my PhD there was no expectation that you would be published, but there is that expectation now. At the early stage of your career, it is useful to publish, for instance,  in mid-ranking journals that are well  known and widely read. In my view, it is probably better, as a strategy, to write one or two pieces in high-quality journals than many in less high quality journals. Writing reviews is a good entry into scholarly writing, and for your own development, too, because it helps you to become familiar with scholarship in your field.

What is most satisfying about my life as a scholar and as academic? In the course of my career, it has changed. Writing is  important to me but over time, teaching has become more important. I like teaching undergraduates; third year is my preferred level. I put a lot of work into my teaching, and there is no limit to the number of hours I spend – or could spend -- preparing and refining. The first time you teach a course, it’s an experiment, the second time you are refining, the third time you know how to teach, but then the fourth time is less exciting. Finally and above all, freedom is the big payoff: the ability to follow my interests and, despite teaching, meetings and other obligations, the ability to organize (within limits) my own professional life and my time.