About Me
I am a Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Mount Royal University and a scholar-activist working at the intersections of gender, sexuality, mental health, and social justice. With a PhD from the Harriet Tubman Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland and a Master of Social Work from Western New Mexico University, my research, teaching, and activism are rooted in intersectional feminist, queer, and transnational frameworks. I challenge cisheteronormative, colonial, and pathologizing approaches to knowledge production, with particular attention to how institutions shape lived experiences of care, identity, and belonging. I am committed to scholarship that is accountable to the communities it engages and to pedagogical practices that are relational, accessible, and liberatory.
Teaching & Research Interests
Current Project
Strut That Stroll, examines the people, places, and politics of Calgary's historic sex industry, tracing how legal regimes, municipal governance, and social reform movements shaped the city's sex industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using archival research alongside feminist and critical social history methods, this project foregrounds sex workers’ lives, labour, and collective strategies, while critically interrogating the moral, carceral, and medicalized frameworks that have governed sexuality and public space. While historically grounded, this work is informed by contemporary debates around sex work, criminalization, and harm reduction. Attending to continuities and ruptures between past and present, the project situates historical analysis as a tool for understanding how stigma, surveillance, and policy legacies continue to structure contemporary sex workers’ experiences.
Teaching & Research Interests
- Global Gender Issues
- Settler Colonialism
- Queer and Trans Mental Health
- Critical Masculinity Studies
- Social Justice–Oriented Research Methods
- Critical Approaches to Knowledge Production
Current Project
Strut That Stroll, examines the people, places, and politics of Calgary's historic sex industry, tracing how legal regimes, municipal governance, and social reform movements shaped the city's sex industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using archival research alongside feminist and critical social history methods, this project foregrounds sex workers’ lives, labour, and collective strategies, while critically interrogating the moral, carceral, and medicalized frameworks that have governed sexuality and public space. While historically grounded, this work is informed by contemporary debates around sex work, criminalization, and harm reduction. Attending to continuities and ruptures between past and present, the project situates historical analysis as a tool for understanding how stigma, surveillance, and policy legacies continue to structure contemporary sex workers’ experiences.
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I live and work on the traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai Nations), the Tsuut’ina Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda Nations (in a place now called Calgary), and on the unsurrendered, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation (in a place now called Ottawa). I recognize that these lands remain Indigenous lands and that I, a white settler social worker and university professor, remain complicit in systems of colonial control and dispossession. I am committed to practicing in ways that support Indigenous sovereignty, uphold the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action and UNDRIP, and actively challenge colonial, imperial, and carceral systems. My practice is rooted in solidarity with Indigenous resistance here and with global movements for justice, liberation, and decolonization. I am actively committed to continued education on how I can better respect, learn from, and advocate for all Indigenous peoples across and beyond Turtle Island.
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Last updated January 2026.
