Mount Allison Sociology :: Current Students

Student Showcase

Students can carry out their own social research while doing their Honours or as student research assistants. Read the descriptions below and see other titles of Honours themes chosen by students in the department by clicking here.

Girl Power Camps: A Study of Empowerment in Theory, Instruction, and Practice among Atlantic Canadian Girls

Sarah J. Patriquin
Supervised by Dr. Erin Steuter

“There is a substantial amount of literature that suggests that girls are now in a time of great crisis: a crisis of self-esteem, of leadership, and the overarching crisis of patriarchy which plays a significant and potentially damaging role in the development of girls by reinforcing traditional gender-role stereotypes.

By placing an emphasis on mentorship, self-esteem, and leadership, Girl Power Camps have the potential to present an excellent model of empowerment for social and collective action. I analyzed three Maritime Girl Power Camps.

I found that not all of the camps were teaching the same message of empowerment. One camp focused only on self-esteem issues and the second camp subscribed largely to the Dove Soap brand’s girl power ideal which involved significant promotion of the brand beauty products. The third camp was found to hold values that were truest to the crises at hand and, of equal importance, to the tenets of empowerment theory. This third camp is supported by the Girls’ Action Foundation (GAF), whose model of empowerment most closely follows the criteria of empowerment theory.

It is important that the camps emphasize that there is an end goal to empowerment; social change. The camps emphasize individual solutions to issues of body-image and self esteem without drawing the girls together in any form of collective action. Achieving empowerment itself is irrelevant if the girls are not taught to put this empowerment to work in promoting social change.”

The Social Context of Environmental Change: Sociology’s Role in a Warming World

Andrew Clairmont
Supervised by Professor Berkeley Fleming

Andrew Clairmont argues that sociological and other social science insights would help broaden the public’s understanding of climate change and help with the transition to a changing world. “Climate modeling is plagued by an inability to take human behaviour into account. To be really helpful you need to combine climate data with data from social systems; neither alone can tell us how to adapt to the changing climate,” says Clairmont. “With better information, society can begin the transition to a world that will be very different from our present one, not just in terms of its climate but in its distribution of food, water, patterns of migration, and different distributions of military, political, and economic power.”

Clairmont analysed over 300 articles on climate change as part of his research for his Honours thesis. He looked at five Canadian newspapers with the highest Canadian readership and three online publications with the highest readership internationally. The five print publications were The National Post, the Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun, The Toronto Star, and the Gazette, and the three on-line publications were The New York Times, The Times of India, and The Wall Street Journal.

Clairmont found that even when articles talked about social issues, for example how the environmental changes would affect people, the spread of disease, or the disproportionate burden on the poor, the authors were not using social scientists as their experts. The most commonly cited experts for the newspapers were physical scientists, 70 % of the time, followed by economists, at 15% and politicians at 8%. The National Post accounts for half of all articles expressing doubts that climate change was caused by man.

Medicalization, Individualism and Othering: Experiencing ADD/ADHD in Schools

Jinette Comeau
Supervised by Dr. Judith Doyle

When I learned that the number of Ritalin prescriptions to treat ADD/ADHD had increased by 600 % in Canada since 1985, I was immediately interested in understanding how and why so many children were being diagnosed with the disorder. I soon discovered that it was schools which were for the large part singling out the behaviors that are thought to be indicative of ADD/ADHD, and I decided to conduct research on the educational experiences of students diagnosed with the disorder.

I looked at ADD/ADHD from a sociological rather than a psychological perspective, which enabled me to identify structural inequalities operating within schools that work to place certain students at a disadvantage. My research has filled a gap in the ADD/ADHD literature, and I anticipate that it will inform educational policy makers and prevent unnecessary ADD/ADHD diagnoses and Ritalin prescriptions in the future. Conducting primary research and writing an honours thesis was extremely rewarding, and it greatly added to my overall experience at Mount Allison University.