Archive

Invited talks and webinars

• 2026. "How to Make Informed, Practical and Responsible Decisions About Using AI in Academic Writing." Invited webinar co-sponsored by the Department of Criminology and the Policy Studies Ph.D. program, Toronto Metropolitan University, 26 March.

Conference presentations

• 2024. "My writing partner is hallucinating: Investigating ChatGPT's impact on PhD students' writing practices." Consortium on Graduate Communication Virtual Summer Institute.
• 2021. "Graduate students' writing anxiety and the limits of self-care." Canadian Sociological Association.
• 2021. "Harnessing online writing retreats to help graduate students." CAWS Colloquium.
• 2021. "Not Indigenous enough: The voices of Indigenous atheists in three Canadian cities." Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network Conference.
• 2018. "Political atheism and individualism." Pacific Northwest Political Science Association.
• 2017. "The social justice atheist: A case study of atheist activism in Edmonton." Canadian Sociological Association.
• 2017. "Atheist identity in Edmonton, Alberta: An intersectional approach." Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
• 2016. "'Not that kind of atheist': Scepticism as a lifestyle movement." Canadian Sociological Association.
• 2016. With A. Sandhu. "Between Islam and Islamophobia: Stigma management." Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
• 2015. "Not all atheists are skeptics: Boundary work among secularists in Alberta." W. David Pierce Research Colloquium.
• 2015. With A. Sandhu. "We're not Islamophobes: Stigma management and atheist activism." Association for the Sociology of Religion.
• 2014. "Magic and mysticism in the (post)modern cult of homeopathy." ICSA Annual Conference.
• 2012. "Social inequality in higher education: Investigating (mis)perceptions about low-income students." Canadian Sociological Association.
• 2012. "The science of happiness: Positive psychology as a scientific movement." International Conference on Science in Society.
• 2011. "New thought and American positive psychologies in context." Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science.
• 2011. "Positive psychology as a scientific movement." Canadian Sociological Association.

Research and archival work at the University of Alberta and the University of New Brunswick, 2007–2013.

• University of Alberta Prison Project
• Stephen A. Kent Collection on Alternative Religions
• Irish cultural identity, mediation, and music in New Brunswick
• Gender roles in Japanese comics

University of Alberta and Concordia University of Edmonton, 2015–2021.

• Introductory sociology
• Criminology
• Sociology of deviance and conformity
• Sociology of religion
• Social psychology
• Social movements
• Social studies of surveillance
• Sociological concepts and perspectives

• 2024–2027. Marsden Fund Research Grant, "Indigenous nonreligion in Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada," co-investigator.
• 2017. Graduate Student Teaching Award, University of Alberta.
• 2017. Best Student Paper Award, Canadian Sociological Association.
• 2013. SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship, "The debunkers: moral identity in the skeptical movement."
• 2013. President's Doctoral Prize of Distinction, University of Alberta.
• 2011. SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship—Master's, "Martin Seligman's positive psychology: a case study in the sociology of ideas."

• 2019. "Social justice a strong motivator for local atheist groups." A Folio profile of my research on atheist activism in Edmonton.