Department of Sociology
Jennifer Brayton
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Jennifer Brayton, Associate Professor OFFICE: JOR-331 |
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QUALIFICATIONS:
B.A.H. (Queen’s University), M.A. (Queen’s University), Ph.D (University of New Brunswick, Sociology)
TEACHING INTERESTS
Popular culture; Media Studies; Technology and Society; Canadian cultural production
Professor Brayton uses active engagement learning and teaching practices in her classroom, connecting course content with every day contemporary real world examples from mass media, ranging from film and TV to video games and mobile technologies. She has been involved with service learning opportunities for students in her courses, allowing students to directly engage with the Toronto community through teaching in a twinned high school class. She supervises graduate students in the Communications and Culture program and has taught several directed independent graduate reading and research courses.
RECENT COURSES:
SOC 202 Popular Culture
SOC 525 Media and Images of Inequality
SOC 932 The Entertainment Industry
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Proferssor Brayton’s general areas of teaching, research, and publishing include popular culture and mass media, cyberculture studies, gender and technology studies, and sexual identity. Her most recent article, "Getting It On in Virtual Reality: Sex in the Matrix and Other Films," appears in the anthology, Popping Culture. She is currently writing a textbook on Canadian popular cultural industries.
Mediated representations of social groups; Fandom studies; Canadian media; Popular cultural products
Prof. Brayton has been actively engaged in interdisciplinary research, studying a wide range of topics including active fan practices, gendered access to the internet, cyberfeminism and activism, and mediated representations of social groups. She largely studies visual cultural representations, and enjoys exploring Canadian media culture in particular.She has recently completed three separate research projects examining cinematic images of male sports fans, post-apocalyptic societies, and intellectual disabilities, and a fourth project on using videogames to engage undergraduate students in critical thinking. She is co-investigator to a new research study on social media and pro-environment messaging, initiated by her doctoral candidate Barry Wallace.
RECENT AND KEY PUBLICATIONS
| 2010 | “Virtually Getting It On: "Sex" in Film and Television Narratives, 1992-2010” pp. 109-121 in Pomerance and Sakeris, eds. Popping Culture. Boston: Pearson. |
| 2008 | With Tarek Bereket. “Bi No Means: Bisexuality and the Influence of Binarism on Identity.” Journal of Bisexuality. 8.1: 51-61 |
| 2007 | “Fic Frodo, Slash Frodo: Changing Fandoms and The Lord of the Rings.” pp. 137-153. In Mathijs and Pomerance, eds. From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi. |
| 2006 | With Ollivier, Robbins, Beauregard, and Sauvé. “Feminist Activists Online. Observations from Canada: A study of the PAR-L Research Network.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 43.4 (November): 445-463. |
COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES
Professor Brayton is a long time active co-moderator and technical support staff woman for Canada’s first electronic feminist organization, PAR-L (www.unb.ca/PAR-L). This bilingual organization maintains a mailing list and web site for sharing resources on policy, action and research on feminist issues in Canada and globally. She is an active member of the Canadian Sociology Association, Canadian Communication Association, Film Studies Association of Canada, Canadian Games Studies Association, and other related professional organizations.
PERSONAL GENDER AND TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH RESOURCE WEBSITE
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