Coffee With A Prof!

FASS’s Coffee With a Prof program is back for Winter 2023 (January 16 – April 10)!

Have you ever wanted to have an in-depth conversation with one of your Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) professors? The Department of Sociology and Anthropology have 5 fantastic Professors for you to chat with!

☕ How to schedule a chat:

1. Contact the professor of your choice from our list of participating faculty members and find a mutually convenient time for your meeting. We’ll pay for your beverage at the campus Bridgehead in the Nicol Building, or you can meet virtually over Zoom.
2. Once you have confirmation from the professor, please email Sarah Mohammed (sarah.mohammed@carleton.ca) with the details of your chat.
3. If you’re meeting in person, tell the employees behind the counter at Bridgehead that you’re participating in the Coffee With a Prof program and your beverage will be paid for!

Learn more at www.carleton.ca/fass/coffee-with-a-prof

Some information on our Professors:

Dr. Matthew Hawkins: Dr. Hawkins is an Instructor II in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He is an anthropologist who studies soccer cultures with a focus on fandom in Argentina, where he has conducted fieldwork on the stadium terraces of San Lorenzo de Almagro. Recently, his research has been with fan and player activists who are creating a “feminist football” culture in Argentina. He is interested more broadly in the social and cultural significance of sport, public and shared emotions, Latin American music (especially cumbia!), ethnographic research, and transformative political movements.

Dr. Beatriz Juárez-Rodríguez: Dr. Juárez-Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her academic research has focused on the intersection of ethnic, racial and gender identities, Black women’s social organizations, and social movements and the state in Venezuela and Ecuador. Her current research involves ethnographic work with and alongside Afro women’s organizations in the north highland region of Ecuador, analyzing their political practices and antiracist and antisexist discourses to show how they are fighting against multiple forms of oppression while challenging exclusionary public policies. A related research interest is the politics of memory and how social organizations, and community members engage in collective processes of recovering their past and mobilize local historical memories as political strategies to create a shared history of resistance and struggles against national oblivion, political oppression, and social injustice. She has explored these themes both in her research in Ecuador and through her participation in a collaborative team research project in El Salvador, called “Surviving Memory in Post-Civil War El Salvador”.

Dr. Justin Paulson: Dr. Paulson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the current Director of the Institute of Political Economy. His interdisciplinary training included literature and music studies at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, followed by graduate work in critical and cultural theory at the University of California-Santa Cruz. He teaches courses and graduate seminars on Marxist theory, histories of social thought, and rightwing populism and Trumpism, and is currently immersed in research on the histories of dispossession and extraction/accumulation in parts of the upper Kitchi Sipi (Ottawa) watershed. He spends most of his spare time with his 3-year-old daughter, Rosa.

Dr. Blair Rutherford: Dr. Rutherford is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He is interested in what he calls the cultural politics of rural livelihood strategies. This means he examines how various cultural assumptions about, say, gender, race, class, generation, etc. at various scales (local, national, global) shape ways in which economic practices and arrangements are constituted and the power dynamics and struggles around them. Along with Doris Buss (in Law and Legal Studies) and African colleagues, he currently carries out ethnographic research on gender and artisanal gold mining in sub-Saharan Africa. He is interested in African Studies and political economy. He has authored two ethnographies on farm workers in Zimbabwe and has co-edited several other ones in the field of African Studies.

Dr. Alexis Shotwell: Dr. Shotwell is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her academic work addresses impurity, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and political transformation. Her political work focuses on queer liberation, Indigenous solidarity, and feminist community education. She is a nerd who loves science fiction, makes functional pottery in her spare time, bikes all winter, and owns a banjo. She is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca) and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.

Dr. William Walters: Dr. Walters is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He trained in chemistry at Imperial College, London, before doing graduate studies in politics at City University of New York and York University, Toronto. He has published widely in the areas of political sociology, citizenship theories, and Foucault studies. His current research looks at secrecy, mystery, conspiracy, deception and revelation within politics and culture. His hobbies include football/soccer (Liverpool FC), music (indie, electronic, alt-folk), running and travel.