Suicide rates among Indigenous Peoples in Canada remain significantly higher than those in non-Indigenous populations, yet explanations have mostly focused on individual and clinical factors. This study offers a sociological perspective by framing suicidality as an anomic response to structural frustration and strain caused by settler colonialism. In this view, patterns of suicidality, like patterns of drug use, are seen not as symptoms of personal pathology but as effects of structural harm experienced by Indigenous communities. Using data from the 2017 Aboriginal Peoples Survey, the analysis explores how structural conditions, together with constellations, relate to differences in suicidal thoughts. The results reveal that functional disability and unmet medical needs are strongly linked to both past and recent suicidal ideation, while residential instability correlates with past suicidal ideation. Marital ties are associated with lower levels of past suicidality. Variations across Indigenous identities remain, with Inuit respondents showing higher levels of suicidal thoughts. Mental health and a constellation of coping mechanisms also relate to suicidality. These findings emphasize the need to view suicidality within the context of broader structural inequalities and contribute to a sociological understanding that is informed by Indigenous and decolonial scholarship.
The measures to limit COVID-19 and the pandemic had deleterious effects on social cohesion. We propose that perceived clarity and coherence of governmental measures and perceived majority support of these measures together create a normative context that shapes social cohesion. Using a representative sample of adult Canadians (N = 1180) and a longitudinal design, we aim to (1) identify profiles of perceived clarity, coherence and majority support of governmental measures at three time points during the first year of the pandemic and (2) determine if the dynamics identified are associated with attitudes and behaviours capturing social cohesion at a later time. Results showed that two profiles for perceived clarity/coherence and for perceived majority support best described our data. For both profiles, about 75% of the sample was classified in a high-level decreasing profile and 25% in a low-level decreasing profile. The identified profiles were associated with social cohesion months later. Our results provide insights that could be used by governments to better plan the message sent to the population during a future crisis to maximize social cohesion.
This article examines how skilled Pakistani newcomers to Canada experience and make sense of the loss of recognition associated with their prior professional identities following migration. Drawing on 43 life-history interviews in the Greater Toronto Area, I use the Urdu word lachak (flexibility) to describe how my interlocutors lower expectations, accept downward mobility, and reorient their identities in order to move forward with settlement. I argue that lachak captures how symbolic capital loss becomes embedded in everyday self-understandings, producing an embodied and often obscured sense of nonbelonging. The analysis also demonstrates that these processes are structured through gendered differences across professional and domestic domains. By foregrounding lachak, the article shows how nonbelonging persists through the normalization of diminished recognition in settlement.
This article presents the results of a study conducted in Quebec (Canada), in the Montreal and Abitibi-Temiscamingue regions, with forty pregnant women interviewed between 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on interpretive phenomenological analysis, the study highlights pregnancy-related anxiety exacerbated by reduced medical care, the exclusion of partners, social isolation, and the disruption of pregnancy-related rituals. While pregnancy is generally a significant transition in terms of identity and social life, women experienced this period in a context marked by loneliness, uncertainty, and increased mental strain. Public health measures focused on managing biological risks have paid little attention to their psychosocial and emotional needs. The exclusion of partners from medical appointments also revealed the limited institutional recognition of their role in the perinatal journey. The article contributes to the sociological understanding of pregnancy anxiety by framing it as a socially constructed phenomenon. It emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary approaches and calls for a revision of public health policies to better support pregnant women and fully recognize what giving birth means-for them and for society.
This article proposes the erotic wound as a sociological concept to examine how queer people of colour (QPOC) experience sexual racism in digital intimacy, and-equally-to demonstrate how they actively contest, rework, and transform its effects through engagement in digital counterpublics. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of 37 online narratives from personal blog posts, essays, news reports, Reddit threads, TikTok and YouTube videos, we identify four interlocking dynamics: racial filtering and exclusion, racial fetishization, hypervisibility and erasure, and digital acts of resistance in subaltern counterpublics. Together, these dynamics reveal that the erotic wound is both an affective injury-producing anxiety, exhaustion, and diminished self-worth-and a social harm sustained by durable inequality, intersectional power relations, and performative scripts of desire in the neoliberal architectures of digital platforms. We draw on feminist andqueer scholarship, and Shiloh Whitney's theory of byproductive affective labour to explain how the wound intervenes in the body through the very relational encounter it organizes, and on Michel Serres's theory of noise and mediation (via Crocker) to show how platforms actively generate, rather than merely transmit, racialized patterns of exclusion and fetishization. Yet the erotic wound is not only diagnostic of harm; it is generative of social worlds. Through digital counterpublics, QPOC convert private harms into public critique, produce alternative imaginaries of desire and belonging, and propose new architectures of intimacy free from racial hierarchy. Foregrounding counterpublics as a primary site of collective world-making is not a secondary contribution of this article but its central one, alongside the theorization of harm. By conceptualizing the erotic wound as simultaneously diagnostic and generative, this study advances sociological understandings of how desire becomes both a site where sexual racism is reproduced and a terrain where it is contested and reimagined.
To what extent is women's employment accepted in modern Chinese firms? Drawing on pooled 2017 and 2021 nationally representative Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) data, this article estimates the socioeconomic predictors and prevalence of the belief that women should be stay-at-home wives instead of working in Chinese firms. The results illustrate that women in Chinese firms have socioeconomic resources commensurate with men, but they remain targeted by the persistent patriarchal belief that women should marry and be relegated to the household instead of work. Contrasting against conventional accounts of private firms as anti-discriminatory, private firm workers are observed to believe that women should be stay-at-home wives instead of working more than state firm workers. In particular, women workers are more likely to resist the traditional belief that women should be stay-at-home wives instead of working, whereas men appear more likely to endorse this belief, especially in private firms. The results suggest that women are not simply passive recipients of patriarchal beliefs, but exhibit a willingness to challenge their symbolic boundaries and reject traditional expectations of unequal gender relations in the workplace.
In the Canadian community of official statistics producers and users, there has been an ongoing debate about the feasibility of using 'visible minority' categories to capture the experiences of Canada's racial minorities. Rarely, however, has this issue been examined from a factual angle; that is, the success of those categories in capturing the experiences of the groups they represent, without suppressing the diversity behind each category in a misleading way. In this study, we have used the latter approach in examining the feasibility of the visible minority category of 'West Asian', which is often used to refer to the Canadians of Iranian and Afghan origins, using Statistics Canada's confidential microdata files from the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB), the General Social Survey (GSS), and the Census of Population. Through this multi-source quantitative analysis, the study compares the two groups across several key dimensions: human capital characteristics, religious identity and experiences, income levels, and labour market outcomes. By showing how this category obscures meaningful intragroup differences, this paper not only contributes to the growing bodies of literature on Iranians and Afghans in Canada but also highlights a need for more nuanced and intersectional approaches to understanding the experiences of minorities.
This article examines changes in labour-market discrimination against second-generation immigrants in Finland over an 8-year period, focusing on five groups. It draws on two large-scale field experiments conducted in 2016 and 2024, in which 10,000 matched applications were sent to 2000 vacancies across five sectors. The findings show a nuanced shift in employer attitudes, reflecting both progress and persistence in discrimination. Discrimination against non-European applicants has declined significantly, while bias towards European-origin candidates shows no improvement. Non-European men have seen a greater reduction in employer reluctance, while male disadvantage among European-origin candidates has remained stable. Despite these improvements, results from both periods highlight enduring structural biases, with immigrant applicants continuing to receive fewer callbacks than their Finnish counterparts. The findings underscore that achieving a fair labour market remains a long-term generational challenge rather than a quick policy fix, and provide support for ethnic hierarchies and social distance thesis, and the subordinate male target hypothesis.
Women academics experience inequalities across multiple facets in the university context, including research productivity; teaching, advising and mentoring responsibilities; service workload; and cross-over stress between work and family obligations. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these gender disparities. Drawing upon 2021 data from 467 research faculty and staff at a lead research university in Canada, we highlight such inequalities. While descriptive statistics suggest that men and women report similar perceived setbacks in productivity due to COVID-19, results from structural equation models (SEM) estimating mediating associations tell a different story. These analyses demonstrate that women were disadvantaged compared to their male counterparts during the pandemic because of unequal exposure to work-family conflict, which strongly correlates with the perception of lost productivity. We further hypothesized that faculty and research staff with young children would perceive lowered productivity during the pandemic, and that these burdens would be stronger for women than men. However, we did not find evidence to support these predictions. We unpack these results and conclude our paper with a discussion about the importance of rethinking the operationalization of "productivity" in post-secondary institutions, given women's differential exposure and vulnerability to stressors during the pandemic.
This study proposes a theoretical model that integrates important mediating and moderating effects to explain whether and how homeownership is potentially linked to health in today's Canadian society. This integrative model examines (1) whether the link between homeownership and health is moderated by housing cost (especially housing unaffordability) and (2) whether the homeownership-health link can be explained by the three mechanisms represented by three satisfaction perceptions-housing satisfaction, community satisfaction and life satisfaction-that stress homeownership's material, social and symbolic values, respectively. Guided by the theoretical model, the analyses of the 2021 Canadian Housing Survey data generate important insights. First, there is clear evidence that homeownership is significantly related to better health in Canada and that this link is not diminished by unaffordability. Second, homeownership is not directly linked with health, and the revealed link can be attributed to the three mechanisms. These underlying mechanisms, supported by empirical evidence, can explain how homeownership is related to better health and shed light on how housing inequality may translate into health disparity.
There has been no nationally representative examination of paranormal beliefs in Canada for over two decades, even though Canada has undergone major social shifts in that time, such as greater secularization, which could affect the prevalence of paranormal beliefs. This research note analyzes a nationally representative sample of Canadians to determine the prevalence of paranormal beliefs, identifies which sociodemographic factors are related to these beliefs, and determines which variables are most substantively important for explaining variance in paranormal beliefs. Overall, a little under half of Canadians, 44.8 percent, believe in at least one paranormal phenomenon, and another 31.3 percent do not believe in any but report neutrality about at least one. Only a little under a quarter, 23.8 percent, firmly do not believe in any paranormal phenomena. Respondents were most likely to believe in ghostly hauntings and least likely to believe in several Canadian cryptids, or undiscovered creatures. Gender, education, sexual identity, age, and religion-related variables were all associated with paranormal beliefs. Follow-up analyses showed that religious identity and how religious a participant considered themselves to be explained the most variance in the models. Overall, paranormal beliefs are common in Canada, and religion remains important for understanding phenomena such as non-scientific beliefs.
I examine how the teacher-as-hero trope, rooted in the Filipino concept of bayani, functions as a weaponized virtue. Although kabayanihan (heroism) traditionally signifies collective service to the bayan (community), it now operates as cultural hegemony, reframing systemic neglect as personal virtue and depoliticizing chronic underfunding and exploitative labour. Through neoliberal critique and structural violence frameworks, I trace how heroic narratives normalize invisible labour, intensify emotional demands, and sustain burnout as an institutional outcome rather than an individual failing. Political elites benefit most from this trope; they substitute symbolic praise for material investment and evading accountability for structural failures. I do not dispute teachers' dedication; I call instead for dismantling the ideological structures that convert admiration into exploitation. Genuine educational reform requires fair labour conditions and a shift from the hero trope to structural justice, a lesson relevant across the Global South.
Empirical analyses and theorizing of structural stratification in tertiary education have focused almost exclusively on universities. In doing so, such work ignores large swaths of the organizational field, including counterparts in the understudied community college, private career college, and theological sectors. Through this study, we re-examine structural stratification in Canadian tertiary education using a custom web-scraped dataset containing information on over 600 organizations spanning four distinct sectors. Using the social media followings of these organizations as a proxy for social status, we overcome hurdles that have historically prevented cross-sectoral analyses of structural stratification in this field. Using these data, we make multiple novel empirical observations. First, stratification in the private career college sector exceeds that detected anywhere else in this field. Second, observed levels of stratification among community colleges and universities are virtually indistinguishable. Third, structural stratification is most muted in the theological sector. We explore and theorize potential mechanisms that could be driving these trends, including mission drift, sector straddling, exposure to market forces and embeddedness in localized communities.
This article draws on the analysis of semi-structured interviews to compare the immigration experiences of queer individuals from the Global North with those of their counterparts from the Global South. It examines the process of racialization experienced by some of these individuals upon arrival in Quebec/Canada, the transformation of this process when it had already been experienced in the country of origin, and the continued social recognition as white people for others. The article then examines the impacts of these processes on the construction of these immigrants' life stories in the host society, particularly in relation to their social class. It also demonstrates that the privilege enjoyed by individuals socially recognized as white manifests itself in the absence of challenges related to racialization in their life trajectories.
This paper examines affective climate polarization (ACP) and affective political polarization (APP) - emotional distance between supporters and opponents of decarbonization and political partisans, respectively. Analyzing original, representative Canadian survey data (n = 2503), we examine why people have differing levels of ACP and APP and the extent to which ACP and APP predict support for a carbon tax and beliefs about how decarbonization will affect jobs. The intensity of individuals' support or opposition to decarbonization is the most important factor in predicting ACP. The strength of ideological alignment predicts APP among both liberals and conservatives, and, on the political right only, attitudes to decarbonization also explain variation in APP. Support for an industrial carbon tax and belief that decarbonization will increase jobs are related to political ideology and attitudes toward decarbonization more strongly than to either measure of affective polarization. These findings show that climate politics intensify partisan animosity, albeit in different ways on the political left and right.
Community has long been key to the well-being of gay men, yet little research examines how gay fathers, specifically, relate to the broader LGBTQ+ community. Drawing on interviews with 18 mostly White, (upper-) middle-class Canadian gay fathers, I investigate their expectations and experiences of family and community, showing they describe 'gay community' in terms of gay ancestors, friends, and shared gay activities. Fathers express deep gratitude for past LGBTQ+ people whose interdependent collective struggle secured their rights to marry and parent. They hope for support from family and gay friends and strive to maintain community ties, but find their efforts complicated by the demands of intensive parenting, geographic distance, and limited childcare support. As children grow, fathers build community with the straight parents of their children's friends, demonstrating how social class, whiteness, and homonormativity shape the reorganisation of these Canadian gay fathers' lives-a process I call the gay parental turn.
Designed to protect the dignity of research subjects, there is limited data on either the effectiveness of Research Ethics Boards or on the scope of the unintended effects of REB processes on core university functions of research, teaching and learning. This article shares results from an online survey on unintended effects, disseminated to postsecondary faculty and students in Social Sciences and Humanities across Canada (n = 620). Key findings include: 78% of respondents report REB processes deter them from undertaking research at all, including minimal risk research, and the prospect of REB review shapes research projects, particularly relating to equity or vulnerable populations. Seventy percent of faculty avoid assigning students research assignments with human subjects because of REB concerns, and 58% have advised graduate students to avoid research with primary data. The authors advocate for robust use of Tri-Council powers to develop feasible reforms to promote research and limit ethics creep.
In this article, we explore survivor strategies for safety and the development of resilience in the context of domestic and intimate partner violence (D/IPV) experienced in rural Canada. Through the thematic analysis of 24 qualitative interviews, this paper identifies several ways that survivors sought safety on individual, relational, and community levels. Engaging a social ecological understanding of resilience, we highlight how the close-knit nature of rural cultures presents opportunities and challenges when seeking safety for survivors of D/IPV. The findings of this study inform broader academic and policy discourses on rural D/IPV as well as D/IPV service provision in rural communities by deepening an understanding of the unique strategies for safety of rural survivors and the role of informal support in their resilience as they navigate extreme forms of D/IPV in rural Canada.
Canadian right-wing youth social movement actors are not a monolith. In this paper, I analyze 45 interviews and notes from a year of ethnographic fieldwork with a population of Canadian right-wing youth activists between 2023 and 2024. While these youth activists are part of the same right-wing organizations, some espouse far-right ideas, others are more moderately right-wing, and some are in between. For this sample of right-wing youth, differences lie in their experiences of peer and familial socialization. While far-right youth had strained peer and familial relationships, their moderate-right-wing peers had supportive families and experienced peer connections throughout the life course. Liminal right-wing participants disrupt this dichotomy as they have had a disconnection from family but have strong peer connections in the university setting as young adults. In this study, I highlight how familial and peer ties may play an important role in youths' turn to the right in Canada.
Historically, gender-neutral or androgynous first names have been relatively rare, showing little sign of upward or downward temporal trend in Canada or elsewhere. Using digitized birth registration records from three provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario) and for all of Canada, we highlight a rise, beginning around 1990, in the proportional representation of gender-neutral forenames. Examples of such names include Avery, Charlie, and Riley. Our analyses show that different measures of androgynous names, from different provinces or for all of Canada, produce similar results, revealing a recent and unprecedented temporal rise. We frame a discussion of this acceleration within the context of changing gender relations in Canada. The weakening of gender as a dominant status characteristic, a historical decline in the effect of gender contamination on naming, and the increasing diversity of girls' and boys' first names all play roles in the recent rise of gender-neutral names in Canada.
