Kristen Bass

Kristen’s research interests are in the area of labour, culture, and the environment. Her PhD thesis focuses on workers in Alberta’s oil and beef industries to understand their experiences and perspectives on the environment and their labour. Having grown up in rural Alberta herself, Kristen has cultural and familial ties to both these industries.

Bio:
Born and raised in a rural community in north-west Alberta, Kristen spent many years living in Edmonton, then Toronto, with a brief stint in Montreal. While she called Eastern Canada home for many years, Kristen’s heart remains in the Alberta prairies and mountains.

In Fall 2021, Kristen started a direct-entry PhD in Sociology at the University of Toronto. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Women & Gender Studies, also at the University of Toronto, in Spring 2021. She graduated with Honours and High Distinction, and was nominated for the Governor General’s Silver Medal, awarded to the undergraduate grad with the highest average. Before completing her BA, Kristen worked for six years as a commercial photographer, both in Edmonton and in Toronto. She continues to do the odd freelance photography job and enjoys shooting 35mm film.

All photos by Kristen.

Research:
Kristen is currently conducting fieldwork for her PhD thesis, which focuses on oil and gas workers and cattle producers in rural Alberta. Her project uses interviews and photo diaries to create a sociological account of how these workers make sense of their identities, relate to the environment, and envision the future of their work–all while living and working in a political economic and cultural landscape rooted in the commodities of oil and beef.

Kristen is also part of a multi-year, mixed methods project on higher education protest in the United States and Canada, with an analytic focus on university and police responses to protest. She is a research assistant and coauthor on this project.

Publications:
Kristen co-authored a journal article published in Socius that documents the trends in U.S. and Canadian higher education protest from 2012 – 2018 and also published a sole-authored article in Social Movement Studies on the 2012 student strike against tuition increases in Quebec. See Kristen’s C.V. page for the article references and DOIs.