Five Questions with sociology professor, Dr. Vanessa Oliver
2011-04-18 10:49:04
Sociology professor, Dr. Vanessa Oliver, specializes in youth studies, arts and community based research, and health and homelessness.
1- Why did you decide to study homelessness?
When I finished my Master’s degree, I went to Nepal and spent about six months working in the Nepalese equivalent of a women’s shelter. Nepal and India have an open border, so many young women from rural Nepal get trafficked to the brothels of Mumbai. When there are raids on the Indian brothels, they send the Nepalese girls back to Nepal. The dominant culture in Nepal dictates that these women are not welcome back into their families as they are seen as impure. Rehabilitation homes are set-up to heal survivors and to teach women the critical skills they need to reintegrate into urban societies independently. While working there and seeing some of the innovative ways these problems were being addressed, I recognized that although the issues are slightly different and the treatment of them is slightly different, those issues exist on a large scale here too. When I came home I decided that was what I wanted to do, work on social problems with youth.
I had the opportunity to take what I had learned and apply it in a Canadian context. I think a lot of the approaches that I borrow with care from that Southern experience have really helped in defining my research.2- How do you build levels of trust with communities who have experiences that may make trusting difficult?
It is the most difficult and most critical part of my work. A lot of it is about building relationships. You also have to be able to commit a lot of yourself personally when working with marginalized communities. You are asking people to put themselves on the line, so you have to follow suit. These young women have no one else to turn to and they don’t tend to trust adults. So when they do start to trust you, then that is a very special bond and you have to be delicate with it. A big part of that is listening because no one has really listened to them before. They are young and they have lost confidence and often, just letting them speak, opening your ears and closing your mouth, is one of the most important ways you develop those relationships.
3- What is your favourite TV show?
My favourite TV show is HBO’s The Wire. I am teaching a fourth-year seminar course next term on the show. The course covers representations of social problems and we are going to use The Wire as the case study. It is TV, but TV done in a really socially conscious way. The show is all about structural injustice and it is great fodder for sociology. There are no entirely good guys and no entirely bad guys. I love the way it shows you that a kid selling drugs on the street corner is as much a product of his social context as the police officer that bullies or reaches out to him or her. It concentrates on system failures, constraints on people’s access to opportunities, and any number of the things we talk about all the time in sociology.
4- Who has inspired you?
My grandmother, who turned 100 in August, is the most grounding influence in my life. My mother passed away when I was very young and so my grandma has always been a big part of my life. She has seen everything, yet she is always smiling, proud of us, but really humble, and so compassionate with everybody. She really understands that principle of ‘do unto others.’ She always told me I could be anything I wanted to be and she still does. When I go home she is still the one with the best advice. She is just so lovely.
5- If you could change one thing to make the world a better place, what would it be?
Emma Lazarus says, “until we are all free, we are none of us free,” and I think that is a really good motto to live by. I think it is also a world changing philosophy — if we think we are better served by acting collectively, rather than individually. This type of thinking would make a big change in our world and in our society. We have these neo-liberal discourses that tell us to consume, achieve, do better, grow faster, be stronger, and, at the end of the day, these are fallacies that maintain an oppressive social structure. This focus on individualization as a way to scapegoat and victim blame just doesn’t work. Yet it comes at us from all directions and it is hard not to internalize that message.
How governments and states define citizenship is so limited, it isn’t really democratic citizenship at all. Rather it is this idea that one person votes, rather than becoming engaged or asked to be part of meaningful collaborations. As opposed to endorsing an engaged social consciousness, where the people who sit on boards are from homeless communities and where people making policies are taking into account the people whose lives they are changing every day.
There are a lot of answers to this question, but I think the idea of thinking collectively, rather than as a series of individuals, would really be a paradigm shift in the way we think about society and social justice.