I am a first year PhD student interested in caregiving, paid and unpaid labour, aging, health, and gender. My doctoral dissertation will examine the relationships and division of labour between paid home care workers and family/friend caregivers providing support for aging Canadians. While paid care providers typically limit their work to medical and nursing services, family/friend caregivers are more likely to engage in homemaking activities and respond to the emotional needs of dependents. Yet, the actual division between direct and non-direct care work in the home setting is often unclear. I am particularly interested in how these divisions of labour are negotiated, the partnerships that develop between these two groups of care workers, and the challenges and constraints they face in their efforts to provide care.

This research will be based on an analysis of relevant home care service policies; in-depth, qualitative interviews with paid care providers and family/friend caregivers; and participant observation in home settings to capture more directly how care arrangements are negotiated.

My dissertation will contribute to sociological literature on the boundaries between the home as a private sphere featuring caring social relationships and work places which privilege economic efficiency and standardization. It could also potentially inform homecare services policies in a way that privileges the perspectives of paid care providers and unpaid family/friend caregivers.

Broadly, my research interests are in the sociologies of science and ideas, culture, work and organizations, and theory and methods. My dissertation research is on how Canadian policy research institutes manage organizational and intellectual tensions in the production and marketing of policy expertise. In the first part of the dissertation, I examine how institutes respond to local organizational problems, how they identify and act on opportunities, and how they recover from setbacks. Second, I look at how institutes recruit experts and build networks across political, academic, business, and movement fields.

The next two sections of my dissertation deal more with epistemic cultures in think tanks. I look at how different institutional conditions and common practices impact the production of policy knowledge and advice, and how those processes are complicated by the inclusion of non-academic participants. Finally I examine the knowledge translation practices that institutes employ to lift research and ideas out of one field (such as academic economics), and transform them so that they can be as effective as possible in another (such as policy).

I am collecting the data for this project through semi-structured interviews with directors, researchers, and communications specialists in policy institutes, as well as with academic economists and political scientists. To a lesser extent, I will also draw on survey interviews and archival data from Canadian institutes, economics, and political science. I am analyzing all data using comparative methods.

In addition to my dissertation, I am involved in two collaborative projects on intellectuals and their wider publics. You can find more information about my research at john.mclevey.com.

Ismaël Traoré

My interests reside in the social dimensions of self-transformation practices and my research focuses on these practices among Shambhala Buddhists. My research questions are: 1) what trajectories of involvement characterize Buddhist group meetings? and 2) what are the immediate and long-term consequences of this involvement for participants, especially in terms of their sense of self? Of particular interest is the discord between participants’ creation of a Buddhist self within a religion that advocates “no-self” and how they negotiate being in a postmodern culture that emphasizes the consumption of products to sustain the self while Buddhist philosophy advocates extinction of desires as a means to eternal happiness.

North American literature on Buddhism is mainly restricted to statistical, historical, and autobiographical accounts, and—given the prevalence of Chinese practitioners in Buddhism—on its role in the lives of Chinese immigrants. Additionally, Hori and Soucy (2010) have made a call to Canadian scholars to develop their own Canadian Buddhist literature rather than heavily drawing upon American literature. This dissertation will thus provide a unique interpretive approach to Canadians’ participation in Buddhism. It will contribute to the ‘Westernization of the East’ literature and examine how self-transformation is in fact socially transacted; doing Buddhism is the foundation of being Buddhist.