My research
After graduating from law school at the Université de Montréal and with a Master’s in Sport Management from Brock University, I knew I wanted to conduct research that addresses social problems and inequities, both in sport and in society more broadly.
As a Master’s student and at the beginning of my PhD, I was struck by the more critical conversations happening around the sport context. Beyond just a game or leisure activity, sport is a space to study issues as varied as masculinity and gender, race and racism, colonialism, nation building and myth-making, and labour relations, opening the door for broader conversation and activism from both scholars and athletes.
Merging my interests in sport, masculinity and deviance, I decided to pursue my doctoral studies in Sociology at McGill University, looking at the issue of violence against women in professional sport. More specifically, I examined how and why players in the NBA and NFL – who as young, wealthy Black men sit at an interesting nexus of class privilege and racialized disadvantage in terms of their treatment by the criminal justice system – suffer or avoid certain legal and extra-legal sanctions following arrests for acts of violence against women.
As a lecturer at Middlesex University London, my research agenda has also expanded to the more general study of how social structures, institutions and culture shape deviant and criminal behaviour, as well as how gender, race, class and sexuality impact outcomes in the criminal justice system and the social construction of crime. This has led to projects looking at cultural backlash against socially progressive changes in sport and in society, Canadian hockey masculinity and cancel culture on Twitter, and the construction of victimhood in victim impact statements, with a particular focus on how gender, race and class influence presentations of victimhood in cases of domestic violence and sexual violence. Newer lines of research focus on capitalism and neo-liberalism and its connections to harm and violence.
I’ve had a winding, non-traditional path in academia, with degrees in multiple fields and an interest in several different areas. This has also resulted in learning and using a variety of methods in my research, from Bayesian and frequentist regression and quantitative analysis (using R) to qualitative interviewing and content analysis.
If any of these research themes or methods interest you, I would love to chat about potential research collaborations!
