Health and Mental Health

Congratulations to recent PhD graduate Atsushi Narisada who recently received the Best Dissertation Award for his thesis titled “The Social Antecedents and Consequences of the Sense of Distributive Justice.” This award honours dissertations with excellence of writing and discussion in a sociological topic in the Sociology of Mental Health section in the American Sociological Association … Read More

Professor Scott Schieman  recently spoke to U of T News about his research on the impact of work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Schieman’s recently funded project will build on work he had already begun tracking the changing work and family lives of Canadians. The work will now, however, include a study of the impact … Read More

Professor Ito Peng recently wrote an article for Policy Options, the newsletter of the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP). In it, she discusses the lessons that Canada can gain from studying long-term care schemes in Japan, Korea and Germany. She argues that the implementation of public insurance plans and strong regulations to support … Read More

Professor Akwasi Owusu-Bempah recently spoke to the Toronto Star about the movement to defund police in favour of community organizations  especially in the cases of mental health calls. We have included an excerpt of the article below. Professor Owusu-Bempah is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, with teaching responsibilities at the … Read More

Professor Joe Hermer has recently co-authored an article in The Conversation discussing the need to protect the homeless during the pandemic. The article warns that police enforcing Ontario’s Safe Streets Act that targets homeless people will put them in danger, not only with the law, but also risk spreading the pandemic. Professor Hermer is an … Read More

Many of the Faculty in the Sociology Department have recently adjusted their research to address issues arising as a result of COVID-19 as well as the social distancing and economic shutdown that have been put in place to contain the pandemic. Four sociology faculty members have recently had their projects funded by the Toronto COVID-19 … Read More

PhD candidate Anson Au recently wrote an op-ed published by South China Morning Post, entitled “K-pop deaths show East Asia must end the stigma, and the solitude, that surrounds mental health.” The op-ed discusses the deaths of Korean pop stars Goo Hara and Sulli and the stigma surrounding mental health in East Asia. He argues … Read More

Ph.D. Candidate Patricia Louie has published an article in the Journal of Society and Mental Health, entitled “Revisiting the Cost of Skin Color: Discrimination, Mastery, and Mental Health among Black Adolescents.” This study aims to investigate whether there are significant associations between skin tone and depression in a population of black adolescents. In particular, Louie … Read More

Professor Scott Schieman recently co-authored a piece entitled, “Workers in the gig economy feel lonely and powerless,”  in The Conversation. The article discusses  findings from a study that Schieman conducted with co-investigators Professor Paul Glavin from McMaster University, and Professor Alex Bierman from the University of Calgary. Based on a survey of over 2,000 working … Read More

Ph.D. student Martin Lukk, in collaboration with Joanne Soares and Professor Erik Schneiderhan has published an article, entitled, “Worthy? Crowdfunding the Canadian Health Care and Education Sectors” in Canadian Review of Sociology. The article discusses crowdfunding and asks the question of why Canadians turn to health care and education crowdfunding and how equitably funds are raised … Read More

Ph.D. Timonthy Kang recently published an article in the Journal for Social Thought, entitled “Suicide in South Korea: Revisiting Durkheim’s Suicide.” The article approaches suicide trends and patterns through a Durkheimian lens and draws on Ben Park’s (2012) “cohort theory of collective cultural ambivalence” to examine suicide in Korea. The article also explores current research … Read More

PhD Candidate Patricia Louie and Professor Blair Wheaton have co-authored an article published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, entitled “Prevalence and Patterning of Mental Disorders Through Adolescence in Three Cohorts of Black and White Americans.” This article examines the black-white disparities in mental disorders across three cohorts of blacks and whites in the United … Read More

Ph.D. Candidate Athena Engman recently published an article in Social Science and Medicine, entitled, “Embodiment and the foundation of biographical disruption.” The article reported on data regarding the experiences of 36 post-operative organ transplant recipients. Therefore, the article aims to categorize the conditions that cause “biological disruption” to emerge. This describes the way that individuals with … Read More

PhD Candidate Gordon Brett published an article in the Journal of Communication Inquiry. The article examines the motivations and explanations of health care professionals who negotiate the benefits and risks of online communication with respect to their roles. Gordon Brett is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Sociology Department.  His research interests lie at the intersection of … Read More

Ph.D. Candidate Patricia Louie and Professor William Magee have co-authored an article published in Race and Social Problems, entitled “Did the Difference Between Black and White Americans in Anger-Out Decrease During the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century?” This article examines the black–white difference in anger-in and anger-out in a sample representative of Americans aged … Read More

In an article by CBC News, Professor Judith Taylor commented on  “femtech,” a growing form of technology focused on women’s health. The article discussed both the liberating possibilities of women having use of data about their reproductive health and the risks of growing private sector surveillance over various aspects of their reproductive lives. Professor Taylor … Read More

Assembling the Politics of Noncitizenship: Local struggles to enforce and extend access to health care Patricia Landolt, University of Toronto UT Sociology Working Paper No. 2019-01 January 2019 Keywords: assemblages, boundary work, health care, noncitizenship, political contestation, politics of noncitizenship Full Article Abstract Shifts in global migration are sparking powerful political clashes over the terms … Read More

PhD graduate Kat Kolar and Professor Adam Green published an article in Sociology of Health & Illness that outlines their content analysis of HIV prevention science funded by the National Institute of Health. Green & Kolar find that research into intervention takes a biomedical approach, but prevention research that focuses on risk factors tends to be … Read More

PhD Candidate Kat Kolar, in collaboration with Vicky Bungay (UBC), Soni Thindal, Valencia Remple (UBC), Caitlin Johnston, and Gina Ogilve, published an article in Health Promotion Practice. The authors find that there is an urgent need for HIV/STI prevention initiatives among commercial sex workers. They offer recommendations for programs to address this need in various communities. Kat … Read More