The iiQM Team

Sara Dorow (Director) - on leave Fall 2026

I am a German-American-Canadian who has spent about twenty years living in East Asia. My transnational experiences have drawn me to research related to migration, intersectional relations of power, and feminist political economy, among other things. My working life as a researcher seems to have unfolded in phases: a multi-sited ethnographic study of transnational adoption; then multi-method research in the northern Alberta oil sands region; a multi-media narrative exploration of work; and a community-based research project exploring intersectional approaches to housing. I enjoy teaching qualitative methods at both the undergraduate and graduate levels - part of a lifelong experience of learning and thinking about the how, what, and why of research practice. I’ve been a professor of sociology at U of Alberta since 2002.

Gillian Lemermeyer (Associate Director) - Acting Director Fall 2026

I grew up on a farm in rural Alberta, running wild with three siblings and spending time with our big extended family. I have backpacked around the world and ended up in Edmonton (amiskwaciy-wâskahican) where I raised my family with my husband. I deeply loved working as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care for the first ten years of my career. It was there, very early in my clinical nursing career, that I was first drawn to questions situated in the relational encounters between nurses and other healthcare practitioners with the people in their care. As an assistant professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the U of A, my research practice is focused on themes of embodied ethics, the nurse's touch, and the ethics of artificial intelligence in healthcare. My teaching practice is in healthcare ethics, Indigenous health, and qualitative research methods.

Holly Symonds-Brown (Acting Associate Director)

I grew up in St. Albert back when it was a small town. I was raised by a feminist peace activist so had an early introduction to critical ideas and community action that has permeated all of my work. l moved away to Ontario for my undergraduate and then to the US to work as a nurse and complete grad school before returning ‘home’ 15 years later. I worked as a community mental health nurse and then later taught undergraduate nursing for a long time before doing my PhD. My academic interests are very related to my practitioner work with people on the edges of systems and communities. I theorize care and its politics by studying community care infrastructures and everyday life using qualitative methods. I teach undergraduate mental health nursing and advanced inquiry in the doctoral program.

Emily Friedrich (Thinking Qualitatively Coordinator)

I have several years of communications, project management, and knowledge exchange experience at the University of Alberta, where I have supported an eclectic range of interdisciplinary research teams from family medicine to women's and gender studies to wildfire management. As event coordinator for Thinking Qualitatively, I am most looking forward to the opportunity to ground ourselves in where and when we are, even as we explore what that means in an online context.

Baiyu Su (Research Assistant)

I was born into a migrant family in Inner Mongolia, China, and experienced vastly different social worlds from an early age. Navigating contrasting opportunities and constraints while witnessing their effects on those around me cultivated my enduring interest in how social conditions and human agency shape what people can learn, build, and become. This interest led me on a journey from history to sociology, exploring the production of knowledge, the governing practices that shape collective life, and individual responses to changing social contexts. I am now studying how transnational Chinese feminist communities sustain themselves amid external repression and internal tensions. Through qualitative inquiry, I seek to connect lived experiences with critical analysis, contributing to more compassionate understandings of how people navigate adversity, maintain relationships, and create spaces where more lives can flourish.

Bahareh Abharigolsefidi (Administrative Assistant)

Bio pending