This special episode was recorded Live! on October 4th in Edmonton Alberta, at the Working the Intersections of Gender Conference. Our special guest was Dr. Amy Kaler.
Dr. Kaler has a PhD in Sociology and Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Population Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a Master of Arts in Administration and Policy Studies in Education, a Diploma in Teaching English as a Second Language, and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, all from McGill University. She has received the Faculty of Arts Research Excellence Award at both the assistant professor and associate professor levels. Dr. Kaler’s substantive research has focused on sexual and reproductive health (especially HIV/AIDS and fertility control) in sub-Saharan Africa, with particular attention to the cultural, social and institutional dimensions of public health interventions. She is interested in the dynamics of broad economic transformation and rural household survival in Africa, and in the evolving functions of international development and humanitarian assistance. She has worked in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Uganda, South Africa, Ethiopia and South Sudan with an international array of colleagues in public health, agriculture, demography and religious studies, and have done historical work in Canada. Her work has been primarily qualitative, with an emphasis on open-ended interviews, personal narratives and textual analysis.
More broadly, Dr. Kaler is interested in the unintended consequences of social change. What are the unexpected and unanticipated results of the things we do to improve our lives and the world around us? She is interested in how people imagine the worlds they live in. What ideas, values and visions do we use to interpret experiences and to strategize our own actions, both individually and collectively? She currently teaches undergraduate courses in the sociology of gender, family studies, population, and international development. She teaches graduate courses in gender and family. Her students at both undergraduate and graduate levels have come from sociology, anthropology, political science, women's and gender studies, English and film studies, rural sociology, nursing, public health, geography and anthropology.