_{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: 鈥淭here is one condition for your participation in this research: you must not challenge the research method鈥�. The method, I learned, was institutional ethnography (IE), an approach to sociology developed by Dorothy Smith. The approach emphasizes how what Smith calls the 鈥渞elations of ruling鈥� are put together through people鈥檚 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鈥檛 have a PhD, and although he was widely respected, he knew that there were disadvantages to working without that credential. 鈥淲ith a PhD,鈥� he emphasized, 鈥測ou 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.鈥� 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, 鈥淥f t-shirts and ontologies: Celebrating George Smith鈥檚 pedagogical legacies鈥� , 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鈥揵ut there is a difference. There is a way that the training that prevails in sociology, especially at 91亚色, creates an emphasis on theory as an almost apex practice for sociologists and, with it, expectations that one鈥檚 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鈥攁nd George lays this out in his article on political activist ethnography[1]鈥攂egin 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鈥攜ou鈥檙e not studying the movement鈥攜ou鈥檙e 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 formative influence. He had said to you 鈥渄on鈥檛 challenge me on the method.鈥� 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鈥檛 treat people living with HIV as an object of inquiry. Instead, it began with their experiences and active 鈥渨ork鈥� 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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, 鈥渉ard鈥� 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 鈥� whether it should matter or not 鈥� 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鈥檝e worked on this issue politically and in research. There have been many activities鈥攐rganizing, engaging communities, going to meetings, endless emails, conducting research, writing and publishing, bringing researchers together, mentoring emerging scholars, lobbying politicians鈥攖hat 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鈥� together 鈥搕o 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 鈥� 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鈥檛 yet been discussed in the social sciences 鈥� 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 鈥� 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鈥攎aking a real impact by understanding and engaging with the complexities of society.

This new suite consolidates and streamlines funding opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers across disciplines. While full details will be released in the coming months, the agencies have now published the updated program descriptions for:

• (CGRS M)
• (CGRS D)
• (CPRA)

Ten programs will sunset, and funds will be reprofiled to CRTAS:

• Canada Graduate Scholarships 鈥� Master鈥檚
• Canada Graduate Scholarships 鈥� Doctoral / CIHR Doctoral Foreign Study Award / NSERC Postgraduate Scholarships / SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships / Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships
• CIHR Fellowship / NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowships / SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowships

The new harmonized programs within CRTAS are:

• Canada Graduate Research Scholarship 鈥� Master鈥檚 (CGRS M)
• Canada Graduate Research Scholarship 鈥� Doctoral (CGRS D)
• Canada Postdoctoral Research Award (CPRA)

For the upcoming 2025/2026 competition cycle:

• minimal changes to processes of past programs for seamless transition
• open for applications in summer 2025
• deadlines varying by agency and program
• applicants will continue using the funding agencies鈥� current online systems

Students and faculty are strongly encouraged to review the updated program descriptions now to begin preparing for the upcoming competitions. The Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS) will share further updates on the official competition launches, institutional deadlines, and details about upcoming workshops and scholarship programming to support students applying to these awards later in Summer 2025.

New Award Programs at a Glance

Canada Graduate Research Scholarship 鈥� Master鈥檚 (CGRS M)

Canada Graduate Research Scholarship 鈥� Doctoral (CGRS D)

Canada Postdoctoral Research Award (CPRA)

Additional Key Points

• The Black Scholars initiative will be eligible under the new CGRS M, CGRS D, CPRA as well as continue for the USRA funding opportunity.
• The Canada Graduate Scholarships Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement (CGS MSFSS) will be launched one last time during the 2025-26 competition cycle. The program will be rebranded and redesigned as a supplement for the CRTAS.
• In anticipation of the launch of the Tri-agency grants management solution (TGMS), the application materials for the new CRTAS program may be adjusted, but the overall submission process and key deadlines for the 2025/2026 competition cycle will generally remain consistent with those of previous years.

_{Photo of Stefan Treffers}

After a year of working a retail job, I decided to pursue a Master鈥檚 Degree and after applying to several schools, I settled on the University of Windsor. My choice was influenced, in large part, by Windsor鈥檚 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鈥檛 appreciate the full breadth of Detroit鈥檚 fiscal crisis and restructuring until years later when I made it my dissertation topic at 91亚色.

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鈥檚 Origins of the Urban Crisis and Lo茂c Wacquant鈥檚 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 91亚色, 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鈥� 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 91亚色, 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鈥檓 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 91亚色 in January 2025.