This post is part of the Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details! For more information about #GEAconf202 visit the conference website.

C2C: GEACONF2020 Keynote Speaker Jessica Fields

Dr. Jessica Fields is Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Health & Society and Professor of Health Studies and Sociology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Fields’ research focuses on racialized and gendered discourses of vulnerability and risk. Fields is the author of Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (Rutgers), which received the 2009 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Race, Class, and Gender Section and is currently completing another book, Problems We Pose: Feeling Differently about Qualitative Research (University of Minnesota Press), in which she welcomes emotion and feeling as a source of insight—not an obstacle to understanding—into the racialized, gendered, and sexual inequities that compromise health and well-being.

Fields leads The Beyond Bullying Project (with Drs.Laura Mamo, Nancy Lesko and Jen Gilbert and funded by the Ford Foundation), a community-based storytelling project that interrogates policymaking that challenge perceptions of LGBTQ sexualities and youth as problems and consider what is required for sexual health education to open up to the uncertainty, discomfort, and pleasure of learning from and about LGBTQ sexuality and lives.

Fields commitment and scholarship which interrogates educational conditions for learning as well as focusing on barriers experienced by marginalized communities will provide for a provoking spotlight session. Engaging in a dialogue on the complexity of gender through a collaborative approach to dismantling the barriers through her work by connecting theory to practice, will provide attendees with informative and practical ways to be more genderly inclusive within education.