Laurence Simard-Gagnon is a feminist social geographer and a community organizer. She is joining the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University this fall as a SSHRC postdoctoral scholar (2021-2023). She will be working under the supervision of Dr. Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan on fragmented schooling and the role of school transportation in school trajectories, social inclusion, and daily life of children with autism and their families in Québec City. This project will explore approaches of solidarity in research, as it highlights convergences and encounters between experiences of children with autism and their families and of school bus drivers, two groups suffering forms of institutional violence from educational bureaucraties.
Laurence will build on her interests in urban and institutional spaces of mothering, disability, and mental health, with special attention to relationships of exclusion, marginalization, and abandonment in neoliberal times. She will also explore methods of narrative cartography as a means of documenting structural dynamics and power regimes through (auto-)ethnographic spatial stories. Herself the mother of an autistic teenager experiencing fragmented schooling and exclusion, Laurence will draw in her work with Dr. Carrier-Moisan to lead advocacy efforts for improving access to schooling for autistic children in Québec and for better work conditions for school bus drivers.
