Postdoctoral Scholars and Adjunct Professors
Postdoctoral Scholars
Winnie Yang
Winnie Yang is a Grant Notley Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta under the mentorship of Prof. Michelle Maroto. She holds a PhD in Sociology from McGill University, with a Graduate Option in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her research is organized around two areas of inquiry: (1) social mobility within and across generational lines; and (2) culture and meaning-making related to marriage and family. In each of these areas, she pays particular attention to how sex, gender and sexuality intersect with other axes of social inequality. She conducts both quantitative and qualitative research based on various types of data, including censuses, administrative tax records, surveys, and in-depth interviews. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Demographic Research and the Journal of Population Research.
Adjunct Professors
The new policy document for Adjunct Professors is available here.
Dr. Andriko Lozowy, Sociology Adjunct, University of Alberta
Dr. Andriko Lozowy is a sociologist and photographer-researcher, and those two things have never felt separate to him. His work lives at the intersection of creative practice and social analysis, using landscape, street, and participatory photography not as illustration, but as a genuine method of inquiry.
What that looks like in practice: a lot of walking, a lot of looking, and sustained engagement with the communities and places he’s trying to understand. He’s spent years documenting industrial and peripheral spaces, including long-term work in Fort McMurray and an ongoing project examining the Canada–US border. That current research, developed with Dr. Rob Shields, takes a photoethnographic approach to everyday "borderscapes" in places like Coutts, Alberta and Gananoque, Ontario, asking what visual culture reveals about belonging, exclusion, and sovereignty at a moment when both the political and environmental ground is shifting.
Andriko publishes in venues like the Canadian Journal of Sociology, Media Theory, Space and Culture, and Theory, Culture & Society, but he’s equally invested in research that finds its way into community exhibitions and public installations. Making findings accessible isn't an afterthought; it's part of how he thinks about what research is for.
The other thing that genuinely drives my work is mentorship. Andriko came to this field through his own winding path, and tries to bring that awareness into how he supports students at both the undergraduate and graduate level as they find their own. That means building real research opportunities: collaborative grant projects, capstone and thesis support, research-creation work that lets students develop not just skills, but confidence in their own intellectual instincts.
Dr. Guillaume Durou, Sociology Adjunct, Professeur agrégé, Campus Saint-Jean
Dr. Guillaume Durou specializes in historical sociology of capitalism and the labour movement and contemporary class analysis. His research also focuses on the historical sociology of the francophone community of the early 20th century. He is part of the Great Canadian Class Study with Dr. Maroto et Dr.BayatRizi. He has been involved in the departments through committees. I am also open to supervising students in French and English.
Alla Konnikov, Sociology Adjunct, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Concordia University of Edmonton
Alla Konnikov is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. She holds a PhD from the University of Calgary and is an Assistant Professor at Concordia University of Edmonton. Her research employs an intersectional lens to examine how inequalities are reproduced in organizations, work processes, and labour markets. Centring on the experiences of women, she focuses on how systems of oppression tied to immigration, racialization, and gender converge to shape labour market opportunities and barriers. Her work is situated within the contemporary trends shaping work, such as increased automation, digitization and workforce diversity. Alla is engaged in collaborative and solo research with colleagues in the Department of Sociology and beyond, and is serving on graduate students’ committees.
Katie MacDonald, Sociology Adjunct, Associate Professor, Sociology, Athabasca University
Katie MacDonald (she/her) is an associate professor at Athabasca University and lives in amiskwaciwâskahikan with her family. Her current research looks at how to expand support for and provision of non market housing through a housing justice lens, as well as a new project exploring Canadian experiences of working and living in solidarity with the Sandinista revolution in the 70s and 80s.
She has collaborated with people across the University of Alberta and within the sociology department on research that uses an intersectional lens to consider housing inequity. Katie would be happy to support student research on housing, international solidarity and learning, and feminist methods.
Ken Caine
Dr. Caine is a retired Associate Professor of environmental sociology in the Department of Sociology. He explores social practices, power dynamics, and institutional change in the context of environmental governance, climate change, and community-based natural resource management in the Canadian North and in other circumpolar regions
Jordan Foster, Sociology Adjunct, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Grant MacEwan University
Dr. Jordan Foster’s research lies at the intersection of culture, new media and inequality with a critical focus on how everyday and taken-for-granted trends reinforce and reproduce extant patterns of wealth and privilege. His training as a teacher and researcher began at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and continued at the University of Toronto where he was awarded his PhD. His published work can be found in such venues as Sociology; The Journal of Consumer Culture; Communication, Culture, and Critique; and Social Media + Society.