Gender, Racialization & Ethnicity

UVic sociologists study a range of issues related to gender, racialization and ethnicity.

Katelin Albert

Katelin Albert’s research focuses on genders, sexualities, sexual health, and sex-education. With a foundation in medical and health sociology, her previous work includes a focus on gendered health technologies such as the HPV vaccine, along with more recent research on the COVID-19 vaccine. Her research explores sexual subjectivities across the life course, campus sexual harassment and violence, and student mental health. Katelin is also committed to expanding the canon and practice of sociological and social theory; she prioritizes previously marginalized and excluded scholars, and in her teaching and research she emphasizes a wide variety of ways of knowing.

Aaron Devor

Aaron Devor initiated and holds the inaugural position as the world’s only Chair in Transgender Studies. He is the Founder and Academic Director of the world’s largest Transgender Archives, and Founder and host of the international, interdisciplinary Moving Trans History Forward conferences. His research interests lie in the area of sex, gender, and sexuality, with a particular focus on transgender, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people.

Steve Garlick

Steve Garlick’s research focuses on a range of issues concerning gender (especially masculinity), sexuality, technology, bodies, new materialisms, and critical social theory. His work is particularly concerned with analyzing the ways in which historically specific constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality mediate between social formations and natural forces, and thereby come to shape forms of knowledge, politics, and being.

Peyman Vahabzadeh

Peyman Vahabzadeh’s theoretical and empirical work on social movements and collective action entails the study of colonialism, postcoloniality, neocolonialism, and settler colonialism as historical phenomena.  He also probes the problem of “othering,” from the point of view of Sociology of Knowledge, in the forms of epistemic imperialisms and epistemological hegemonies such as Orientalism and normalization of Western knowledge as global knowledge.  His work in this area advocates epistemic transgressions, exilic-experiential resistance, refugee border-crushing, and views from the Global South.

Midori Ogasawara

Dr. Ogasawara’s research focuses on social consequences of surveillance, identification, personal data, biometrics, and other information communication technologies, which are used to sort out people into different categories, such as gender, race/ethnicity and class. Midori analyzes the unequal effects of surveillance over different categories of people in the contemporary societies and colonial contexts, including racialization, labour control, mobility restriction, and pre-emptive techniques by government, police or colonizers. Her research goal is to unpack the hidden effects of surveillance activities in relation to patriarchy, colonization, state violence and crimes against humanity, and to help decolonization.