ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½

Please join us for the latest Department of Sociology Seminar Series: Listening Carefully to Students’ Ambivalence: Lessons for Qualitative Researchers, featuring Jessica Fields. 

Abstract: In this talk, I’ll share insights from a co-authored paper on the ambivalence threading through the mentoring relationships on a multi-method, multi-disciplinary, and multi-site qualitative research team. Many of the young, racialized, queer, and first-generation student research assistants on this team are asking non-normative research questions, pursuing emerging subfields, or aligned with historically excluded identities and experiences. We explore how to ease the expectation that young, racialized, queer, and first-generation students, mentees, and trainees demonstrate a commitment to institutions and disciplines about which they may be profoundly and rightfully ambivalent. We consider also how feminist qualitative researchers can notice and learn from the ambivalence of the students and mentees we support, trusting that their ambivalence signals a meaningful engagement with the aims, practices, and outcomes of feminist qualitative research and mentorship amid intersecting experiences of, among other things, race, age, and power. 

Bio: Jessica Fields is a sociologist in the University of Toronto Scarborough Department of Health & Society and a member of the University of Toronto graduate faculties in Sociology and Sexual Diversity Studies.