Members

Lacey Bobier is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Health & Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, working with Professor Jessica Fields. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan in 2023. Lacey’s work uncovers how cultural discourses and formal policies shape everyday embodied practices and experiences (such as menstruation or getting dressed), producing gender and gender inequalities in childhood and adolescent sexual subjectivity. She is currently working on a book manuscript detailing how middle-school dress codes function as disciplinary mechanisms that produce gendered embodied and academic inequalities.

Ash Catonio (they/them) is a second year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at UofT. Their research area is gender and sexuality and their research interests include sexual violence prevention, consent discourse, queer world-making, and the sociology of possibilities. They are currently working on a project that investigates the sense of possibility young queer and racialized individuals have around their identities and relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ash.catonio@mail.utoronto.ca

Lindsay Cavanaugh (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Curriculum & Pedagogy at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (The University of Toronto), where she studies femme educational futurities.  Lindsay is a former high school teacher, who has taught on lək̓ʷəŋən & W̱SÁNEĆ territories (Victoria BC) and in North Spirit Lake, an Oji-Cree fly-in community (in northern Ontario). She co-researches softness, an anticolonial, antiracist, disabled, femme intelligence, with Indigenous, POC, and White dis/abled femme* 2S/LGBTQIA+ educational advocates using a methodology called dream-mapping. Lindsay is the founder of the OISE Care Collective, a graduate support network for education graduate students and has co-facilitated other support spaces like Queer/Trans@OISE. Lindsay is also an award-winning poet with writing in Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, and Room.

Mikaela Clarke (she/her) is a Master’s student in the University of Toronto’s Department of Sociology. She is pursuing a collaborative specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies, and possess a background in Criminology and Political Science. Taken altogether, these areas characterize her interdisciplinary interest in a variety of topics at the intersections of law, race, gender, sexuality and crime. A great deal of her work is concerned with the unique experiences of women-loving-women and queer women of colour. Her current research looks at how intimate partner violence and coercive control are experienced within the women-loving-women community.

mikaela.clarke@mail.utoronto.ca

Madelaine Coelho is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Department of Sociology. Her research focuses broadly on the intersections between sexuality/gender, violence, women’s health, and technology while her dissertation aims at exploring responses to gender-based violence (GBV) prevention efforts within different cultural settings. Outside formal research settings, Madelaine works with community and non-governmental organizations on best practices for GBV prevention and implementing technologically facilitated programming.

Jessica Fields is Vice-Dean Faculty Affairs, Equity & Success in the Office of the Vice-Principal Academic & Dean and Professor of Health Studies at University of Toronto Scarborough. Fields’ research focus on racialized and gendered discourses of vulnerability and risk. In studies of high school communities, middle school classrooms, and jail-based HIV education, she explores the ways discourse curtails and produces sexual health education’s gendered and racialized lessons about the array of relationships, identities, desires, and behaviors that people imagine and pursue for themselves and others. Fields is the author of Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (Rutgers University Press), an ethnography of community responses to state legislation requiring school-based health education to promote abstinence until marriage. 

Fatemeh Gharibi (they/them) is a Ph.D. student in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University. Their interdisciplinary research spans International Education, Sexuality Studies, and Theatre. Fati’s work focuses on amplifying the voices of women, queer, and trans people of colour through theatre and performance. Grounded in personal experience, their Ph.D. project delves into the challenges and joys LGBTQ+ international students experience while navigating the intersections of gender, sexual identity, race, and temporary status on a stolen land. In their spare time, Fati enjoys cooking, gardening, and binge-watching sex-centric shows!

Jen Gilbert is Professor and Chair of the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning (CTL). Gilbert’s scholarship and teaching explores the experiences of LGBTQ+ students, teachers, and families in schools and the history of controversies over sex education in schools. Her work is international in scope and she has established a strong research partnership network in both the U.S. and Australia. She is an active public scholar and designs projects that explores the connections of social equity and education. Gilbert previously held Professorship and academic leadership roles at York University in the Faculty of Education. She has been formally recognized for her scholarship, mentorship and leadership by the American Educational Research Association, World Association of Sexual Health and Canadian Society for the Study of Education.

Nakharathep is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Sociology department at the University of Toronto. Their academic interests include critical dis/ability studies, queer studies, and general critical theory. Currently, they are working on a project examining how adults with neurodevelopmental dis/abilities (NDD) (e.g., autism and intellectual disability) experience and resist group home practices using community-based participatory visual research methods (e.g., photo-voice). Their work has also been published in Critical Criminology.

nakharathep.lo@mail.utoronto.ca

Syd is a first-year Ph.D. student in Social Justice Education. They are still figuring out their Ph.D. research, but in the meantime, they have been reading and thinking about masculinities, sex education, and queerness. They recently completed their MA in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University, where they conducted research on masculinities, care, and relationships. Outside of graduate school, Syd loves to make things, whether it is knitting, sewing, cooking, baking, or generally just being creative.

sa.vandewiel@mail.utoronto.ca