Our research team

Current Members

Ryan Conrad

conrad_headshotRyan Conrad is an Adjunct Research Faculty member at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University. From 2019-2022 he was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Cinema and Media Studies Program at York University where he completed his forthcoming book Toronto Living With AIDS (PUBLIC, 2024). He earned a PhD from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University and an MFA in interdisciplinary studio arts from the Maine College of Art.


Gary Kinsman

4227819_origGary Kinsman is a long-time queer liberation, AIDS, anti-poverty and anti-capitalist activist. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was involved in AIDS ACTION NOW!, the Newfoundland AIDS Association and the Valley AIDS Concern Group in Nova Scotia.  He is currently involved in the AIDS Activist History Project and is a supporter of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. He is the author of The Regulation of Desire, co-author (with Patrizia Gentile) of The Canadian War on Queers, and editor of Whose National Security?, and Sociology for Changing the World. He currently shares his time between Toronto and Sudbury.  His website Radical Noise is at http://radicalnoise.ca/ He retired at the end of 2013 from teaching sociology at Laurentian University on the territories of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek nation.  


Alexis Shotwell

alexisAlexis Shotwell is an associate professor at Carleton University, on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin territory. Her political work focuses on queer liberation, indigenous solidarity and decolonization, and feminist community education.  She is the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding (Penn State Press, 2011). She has published in Signs, Hypatia, The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and Sociological Theory. Her academic work addresses racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and political transformation. She’s just finished a book about impurity, complexity, and the relations of the past to unpredictable futures called Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, avaible from the University of Minnesota Press.

Former Members


Ryan Coulling

photo-on-2016-09-17-at-8-37-am-2Ryan Coulling is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Carleton University. Broadly, he is interested in aspects of social justice that impact people in their everyday lives and practices. With a focus on digital and social media, Ryan’s research looks at what happens when individual or collective bodies come into contact online, and how this contact creates the very surface of bodies through emotions. He is especially interested in the responses by people of privilege to the (online) voices of marginalized people.


Chris Hurl

Chris Hurl served as the Project Manager for the AIDS Activist History project from 2013 to 2015. He completed his PhD in sociology and political economy at Carleton University. His dissertation explores the unionization of local government workers in Ontario, and the role of labour activists in shaping provincial state formation. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of Geography and Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University, where he is focused on the implications of new forms of performance evaluation and benchmarking in reconfiguring municipal services in global city regions. In January 2017, he will take up a position as Assistant Professor at Concordia University, Department of Sociology & Anthropology. He has published in Environment and Planning A, Studies in Political Economy, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, History of the Human Sciences, Labour / Le Travail and Alternate Routes.


Janna Klostermann

klostermannJanna Klostermann is exploring ethical subject formation in care. She is discovering more about politics and practices of care as a research assistant with the AIDS Activist History Project, and as a Ph.D. student in Carleton’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. As a member of the AAHP, she co-curated “Positive Sex: Eroticizing safer sex practices in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s,” and is currently curating an exhibition on the radical work of sociologist George W. Smith, who was a founding member of Toronto’s AIDS ACTION NOW! To learn more about her work, visit klostermann.ca/


Priscillia Lefebvre

Priscillia Lefebvre is a research associate. She has a PhD in Sociology with a specialization in Political Economy. Her research focuses on social indicators of mental heath and the organization of work. She places mental health – particularly anxiety and depression – within its social, economic, and political context. More specifically, her research examines the mental health implications of economic restructuring leading to the casualization of work and funding cuts to health care, social assistance, and education. She is especially interested in the effects of precarious employment and chronic stress on individual and community health and well being. Her analysis argues for a more integrated, structural, and community-based approach to mental health.


Sarah Rodimon

rodimon.jpgSarah Rodimon is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. Her research uses Political Activist Ethnography (PAE) to explore how reproductive justice activists are affecting change at the provincial level by pushing back against the control, regulation and stigmatization of abortion in New Brunswick and across Canada. Following the methodological insights of Dorothy Smith and George Smith, she begins her inquiry from the standpoint of activists to explore how abortion care is coordinated by the everyday work of people within institutional and administrative regimes. Her intention is to produce work that will not only prove fruitful within academic spaces, but will also assist activists in the struggle for reproductive justice. As Project Manager of the AIDS Activist History Project, Sarah is particularly excited to engage in the “resistance of remembering,” and to continue learning from the stories and experiences of AIDS activists across “Canada.”