I recently taught an undergraduate course on Inequalities and Social Change (SOCI 102) at UBC. I have also designed and taught Social Inequalities (SOCI 361) at UBC. In both courses I introduced 80-120 students to some of the main avenues of social inequality today by way of an engagement with traditional as well as contemporary sociological research and theory on class (e.g. Marx, Weber, Bourdieu), race (e.g. Winant), gender (e.g. West and Zimmerman), and the intersections between these (e.g. Crenshaw). I conclude the courses by investigating how these various systems of stratification operate during COVID-19 and under the current era of “neoliberalism”. Through the readings and active engagement in lectures, I assist students in developing an understanding of the various aspects of inequality and delve into how these are manifest in the Canadian context.

At UBC, I have also taught Sociological Methods: Survey Research (SOCI 380). This class focuses on how surveys are constructed, administered, and how the data once collected is made usable for statistical analysis. In this course I assist students in developing the skills needed to conduct basic survey research. The focus of the class is on learning how to design surveys that people want to take, that they know how to take, that they are comfortable taking and that give the information, at the right level of specificity, that we need to test various hypotheses.

I also taught Labour Research for Social Change at SFU (LBST 202). This course offered a grounding in what we know and how we come to know it. I teach about both qualitative and quantitative research methods, including interviews, survey research, ethnography and participatory action research (PAR). We learn about the nature of both qualitative and quantitative research including measurement, sampling validity, generalizability, grounded theory and the analyses of both quantitative and qualitative data. I also twice taught an introductory research methods course at UVic in 2021 (SOCI 211).

While at UVic, I was offered a SSHRC Post-doctoral Top-up Fund Award enabling me to design an upper-level seminar style course that I subsequently taught in 2020 entitled: Political Sociology and Public Opinions (SOCI 436). This course offered students a critical grounding in key debates in political sociology and provides them with a selection of research on public opinions which empirically explore these debates. I introduce students to the distinction between sociological and political approaches to public opinion research. There is a significant focus on the debate about change in the connection between public opinions and various demographic variables, most notably social class. In particular, we explore what motivates people to oppose or support re-distributive social policies and how these opinions respond to economic shocks. This is particularly important as inequality continues to grow and many countries await looming economic recessions.