SOPR Student Profiles
Explore this page to learn more about who SOPR students are, what brings us to the program, what we are working on, and the impact we hope our work will have.
Watch this space! SOPR student profiles coming soon!
Meet second-year student, Jennifer Jolie
My name is Jennifer Jolie and I am a second-year student in the SOPR program. When I decided to pursue a PhD in SOPR, my partner and I relocated to Guelph from the traditional territory of Bawaating [Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario]! I am a white settler cisgender straight fat woman with a physical disability who lives with chronic illness and pain. I am often caught in the complex ways in which my fat body is restrained by the ableist arrangements of the world due to impairments resulting from physical illness. This is something newer to me that I am consistently negotiating and renegotiating as I age and move through the world.
I come from a working/middle class family and am also the first of my immediate family to go to university, and the only one in my extended family to pursue graduate level education. Previous to entering the program I worked in a front-line harm reduction role with folks in my community/region. Working in the North meant that there are huge regions to cover with very few resources. I certainly learned to be creative! I also learned a lot about the realities of working within the constraints of funding and policy. During these 12+ years my professional work was to create educational spaces for community members and agency workers to learn about community care such as safer substance use and overdose response, education about how to discuss and support inclusive safer sex practices, information about Hep C and HIV testing and prevention, crisis intervention support and much more.
I have a Master’s degree in Education, and finished it through distance education at Lakehead University while working full-time. My thesis explored issues related to fat studies and social justice by examining the ways in which the body positivity movement on social media causes harm to fat women.
Moving from full-time community work to pursue academia full-time represents a completely new path for me! I chose the SOPR program because I feel like it allows me to enter into academia with the work and life/lived experience I carry, and that it all has value. I wanted to do my PhD in an interdisciplinary program because I want my work to think through possibly divergent theoretical frameworks and innovative methodological commitments to find ways to reveal how the unique experiences of fat women might inform social justice. I am interested in fat studies and feminist critical theory.
I wanted to do my PhD in an interdisciplinary program because I want my work to think through possibly divergent theoretical frameworks and innovative methodological commitments to find ways to reveal how the unique experiences of fat women might inform social justice.
I am currently in the summer of year one, moving into my second year in the fall. I can hardly believe it! This summer I plan to do foundational work to prepare for qualifying exams.
Outside of academia, I am enjoying reconnecting with my self and my interests while exploring Guelph and the surrounding areas! It is such a beautiful region with lots of fun new things to do. I love to be creative and enjoy sewing, crochet, embroidery and going thrifting for materials to upcycle into new creations.
Fun facts: I am a lefty. I like doing puzzles, swimming, drinking coffee and collecting stickers. My furry companion Francis and I have been hitting the streets of Guelph to explore, so if you see us be sure to say hello!
Meet third-year student, Lindsey Thompson
Hello, I am Lindsey Thomson (she/her) and I grew up in a working-class family in a small town in what is known today as Southern Ontario. I am a white settler and I currently live in Guelph, Ontario, treaty lands and territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit.
I live with my partner CJ, our Scottish Terrier Kevin, and our 30-year-old turtle Toby. I am a femme-identified queer woman who is also late-discovered autistic. I enjoy trail walks with Kevin, checking out local coffee shops, and playing music as part of queer-led band @groundcoverband.
Why SOPR?
I have worked as the Manager of Community Engaged Teaching and Learning Program at the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI) at the University of Guelph. After over a decade of facilitating and supporting critical community engaged research partnerships, I decided to apply to the SOPR Program in hopes of returning to school to apply and expand upon my knowledge and passion for engaged research and the role it can play in social justice learning and action.
Research, Community Contributions, and Hopes for SOPR and Beyond:
Overall, I aim to conduct collaborative research to engage diverse autistic femme communities in storytelling and photovoice methods to understand their unique, undervalued knowledges and lived experience. My research aims to expand understandings of autism, support diverse equity-seeking neurodivergent queer communities, and re-imagine and deeply align engaged research and community practice with disability justice principles.
Additionally, I also currently co-facilitate a Collective of neurodivergent/autistic researchers, artists, practitioners, and activists under the leadership of Dr. Patty Douglas, Queen’s University, and the Re-Storying Autism in Education Partnership.
I also co-facilitate Rainbow Pride, a monthly virtual social and support group for queer autistic adults through the neurodivergent-led Dori Zener and Associates.
Ultimately, I view critical femininities and femme theory as having major potential to bridge critical autism studies, disability justice, and broader queer theory and movements while pushing back against colonial binaries, logics, and assumptions through centering historically marginalized femmes and related ways of knowing and being.
Meet third-year student, Nealob Kakar
My name is Nealob Kakar (she/her) and I am an incoming third year SOPR student and one of the editors of SOPR Stories! I am a Queer Afghan storyteller, poet, fibre artist, avid crafter, and well I like to think of myself as just a maker of all things! I spend a lot of my time crocheting, singing, performing spoken word, longboarding within the Haldimand Tract, journaling, making radical zines, daydreaming about the world I want to live in, and most importantly tending to my Persian cat.
I completed an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Political Science: Public Law and Judicial Studies at McMaster University, and a Master of Public Service at the University of Waterloo. Aside from my academic work, I have a community-based background in creating and facilitating trainings and workshops at the university and community level focused on supporting Survivors of Sexual and/or Gender-Based Violence through peer support and abolitionist transformative justice oriented grassroots interventions.
Research Interests and Hopes?
I am deeply interested in the ways communities at the intersection of marginalization, specifically racialized 2SLGBTQ+ Survivors, practice care, mutual aid, radical love, and a praxis of indispensability and radical relationality for one another in ways that colonial bodies of policy have not been and will never be able to. My research aims to contribute to a body of knowledge that reconceptualizes the discipline of policy through critical community-based perspectives that rethink difference and radically re-imagine transformative futures of collective care.
My ultimate hope in this space is to dream of a better world, a just world. A world that isn’t so silent at the hands of structural violence. A world that begs for new ways, emergent strategies, transformative futures where we can exist, where we don’t think of people as disposable. Where we look inward and to each other through our relational shifts. Where we value and uphold our individual and collective responsibilities to one another. Where we refuse to abandon. Heck where we just refuse. At the end of the day our futures are entangled. Our liberation, our freedom, is tied, knotted, stuck, smushed together in a sticky web that cannot be made undone.
Why SOPR?
In entering this program, I came from a super disciplinary (and sometimes rigid) political science and public policy background. During my time in these academic spaces, I was simultaneously heavily involved in creative community-led activist work with Survivor, racialized, and queer communities I hold kinship with. I often found myself teetering 2 different worlds, trying to balance being a disciplinary academic (whatever that may look like?) and a community member practicing vital grassroots groundwork. It wasn’t until I started the SOPR program that I was able to fully enter an academic space with all of these parts of myself intact, and not have to reserve pieces for certain audiences. The interdisciplinary nature and social justice focus of this program allowed me to enter as I am. SOPR continues to provide me with the tools to move differently, rethink normativity, and practice ways of being that the traditional neoliberal academy does not.