Tonino Esposito obtained a Master of Social Work degree in 2007 and a PhD in 2012 from McGill University. Tonino was the recipient of the Hazeldine Smith Bishop Fellowship and PIBE award in 2007, received the 2008 Principal’s Graduate Award, a 2009 FQRSC Fellowship, and a 2012 Wolfe Graduate Fellowship. From 2007-2012 Tonino coordinated the Royal Bank Children Services Data Laboratory at McGill University’s Centre for Research on Children and Families and was actively involved in spearheading research collaborations between the provincial child welfare service association and child welfare agencies in Quebec. His work was primarily focused on building child welfare agencies’ capacity to analyze clinical, administrative, and population statistics in order to plan and evaluate their programs and services. These participatory research collaborations led to the creation of a clinical-administrative longitudinal child welfare dataset for the entire province of Quebec. Tonino’s principal areas of research center largely on the impact of placement for maltreated children in out-of-home care. His three article doctoral dissertation entitled “From initial maltreatment investigation: Exploring the placement trajectories of children in the Quebec child protection system” longitudinally examined the factors associated with when and for whom out-of-home placement, placement changes, and family reunification are most likely to occur for all children investigated for maltreatment in Quebec in the last decade. The results of these analyses enabled the identification of a number of factors that, at initial maltreatment investigation, should be considered when developing child welfare service plans for children.
Andrew S. Hoffman is a PhD candidate in the Departments of Social Studies of Medicine and Sociology. His research examines the multiplex ways in which new genomic technologies in cancer care are coming to challenge the existing social spaces of biomedical research and regulatory work and how, in turn, these modified social spaces and evaluative practices are leading stakeholders to reevaluate what it means for such technologies to be ‘valuable’ in the post-genomic era. Focusing specifically on the U.S. context, his research is primarily qualitative in nature and draws on ethnographic interviews, (participant)-observation, and textual analyses in order to probe the manifold co-productions taking place at the crossroads of personalized medicine, health care evaluation, and regulation – namely, a constellation of practices that are collectively referred to as comparative effectiveness research. In so doing, the analysis travels ‘upstream’ in order to witnesses practices as they unfold – rather than from a position poised only to react to an established ‘technical’ reality – and thereby illuminates many of the complex social, political, ethical, and scientific issues that are currently unfolding within the rapidly changing contemporary health care milieu. Prior to coming to McGill, Andrew received a B.A. in political science (special honors) from Hunter College of The City University of New York and a Certificate in Humanities and Social Sciences from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He also worked for several years as a research data coordinator in the Clinical Trials Department at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
Ian Kalman looks at the diverse experiences of the border in Akwesasne, a single Mohawk community straddling the administrative boundaries of Quebec, Ontario, and New York State. In Akwesasne, a simple walk across the street can mean the difference between a local call, an out of province call, and an international call. New media technologies such as cellular phones, the internet, and new surveillance technologies, both subvert and create ‘the border’, as customs officers, Akwesasne residents, and visitors experience it. Ian asks how the role of borders has changed when technological connectivity can now be more socially binding than physical proximity. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Anthropology in 2005, and subsequently taught English in Turkey, the Ukraine, and as a Peace Corps volunteer in South Western China.
Oran Magal is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy. His dissertation project is part of a philosophical effort to bridge the gaps between our common-sense and intuitive understanding of the world on the one hand, and our increasingly complex and counter-intuitive scientific picture of it on the other. Specifically, Oran is working in the philosophy of mathematics, seeking to understand the nature of the formal abstraction on which theoretical pure mathematics is based, and arguing for an ineliminable, ongoing role for an informal intuitive grasp of concepts alongside and in interaction with this formal abstraction at the basis of modern mathematics. Previously, Oran completed a BA in East Asian Studies and an MA in Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, earning recognition there on the Rector's List.
Paulina Mickiewicz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies. She has a Master’s degree in French Cultural Studies from Columbia University. Her dissertation considers how broader understandings of the library, which she treats as a communicative technology, have shifted dramatically during a period when emerging digital and network media are destabilizing traditional notions of libraries and their role as democratic, public institutions. Her research is centered on the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec, which opened in Montreal in the spring of 2005. Her research interests include new and emergent media technologies, library design and architecture, cultural institutions and urban life, and the digitization of cultural heritage and memory. She has recently published two articles, “Knowledge Experiments: Technology and the Library in Revue Intermédialités, and “Google Books vs. The Library: Shaping Choice, Creating Publics” in the journal Seachange. During her time at McGill, Paulina has been the recipient of, among others, an FQRSC doctoral fellowship, an H. Anthony Hampson Award from the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, and a Faculty of Arts Graduate Teaching Award.