Meet the Team

Work-Life is rooted in transdisciplinary collaborations that drive the framing, methodology, and delivery of the project. Our team members span the fields of sociology, documentary photography, digital humanities, library and information science, gender and women’s studies, and music, many of whom have crosscutting expertise in Indigenous knowledge preservation, labour history, and philosophy.


  • Principal Investigator

    Sara Dorow is Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta, where she also serves as Director of the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology (iiQM). She completed her bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from Valparaiso University in Indiana before attending the University of Minnesota, where she received her Master’s degree in East Asian Studies and her doctoral degree in Sociology. She has also previously served as the founder and director of the U of A’s Community Service-Learning (CSL) program; Chair and Associate Chair in the U of A’s Sociology department; and Associate Director of the U of A’s Intersections of Gender signature research area.


  • Photographer

    Martin Weinhold grew up in East-Berlin. He is a freelance photographer, author and instructor for visual media. He found his main artistic interest in social documentary photography. His independent art works explore their subject with great endurance and depth, the contextualized portrait is his particular passion. Weinhold considers the portrait process a true dialogue situation, the resulting photograph being its visible translation. His most ambitious venture is the WorkSpace Canada Project. For its production he spends several months in the respective Canadian province or territory. Martin Weinhold believes in working on analogue material. In his eyes the limitations of this material are a means for keeping the artistic discipline. The same applies to the craft of photographic printing that he performs with long hours spent in his own darkroom facilities. Weinhold studied Communication in Social and Economic Contexts at the University of the Arts in Berlin. For many years he was cameraman for various German TV channels, as well as for independent productions. He is based in Berlin and Toronto.


  • Co-Investigator

    Dr. Angele Alook is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. As a member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, her research has mainly focused on the political economy of oil and gas in Alberta. She specializes in Indigenous feminisms, life course approaches, Indigenous research methodologies, cultural identity, and the sociology of family and work. She is a co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded (Partnership Grant) Corporate Mapping Project, where she completed research with the Parkland Institute on Indigenous experiences in Alberta’s oil industry and its gendered impact on working families. Angele is also a member of the Just Powers research team, a SSHRC-funded Insight Grant. Angele is a member of the Just Powers research team, which is a SSHRC-funded Insight Grant. Through the Just Powers project Angele has been able to produce a documentary called "Pikopaywin: It is broken" which features stories on the land with Indigenous traditional land users, environmental officers, and elders. She is directing her research toward a just transition of Alberta’s economy and labour force and the impact climate change has on traditional Treaty 8 territory..


  • Co-Investigator

    Dr. Foster is a sociologist whose research and writing spans the sociology of work, rural sociology, political economy, and historical sociology. She has drawn on both qualitative and quantitative methods to study economic issues from a sociological perspective: the history of productivity as a statistic and a concept, generational divisions at work, young peoples’ experiences on social assistance, and youth outmigration from rural communities. Her 2017 book, Productivity and Prosperity: A Historical Sociology of Productivist Thought (University of Toronto Press), explores how the productivity concept and its statistical representation—and the powerful discourses to which it is attached—have featured in three Canadian sites: the Dominion Bureau of Statistics; the short-lived 1960s body, the National Productivity Council; and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. The book received an Honourable Mention for the Canadian Sociological Association’s 2017 John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award.


  • Co-Investigator

    Sean Luyk is a Digital Curation Librarian at the University of Alberta where he is responsible for the University of Alberta’s Aviary repository. Sean brings to the Work-Life project years of experience and expertise building and curating audiovisual collections in Library repository environments, media preservation, and research software management.


  • Co-Investigator

    Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, Canada since 2008. He studied philosophy at Haverford College (BA) and the University of Toronto (MA, PhD). He is currently an Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) Fellow and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Geoffrey Rockwell has published on textual visualization and analysis, AI ethics and computing in the humanities including a book from the MIT Press, Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities (2016). He is a co-developer of Voyant Tools, a suite of text analysis tools, and leads the TAPoR project documenting text tools.


  • Collaborator

    Dr. Paulina Johnson, Sîpihkokîsikowiskwêw, Blue Sky Woman, is Nêhiyaw, Four-Spirit, and a citizen of Nipisihkopahk, Samson Cree Nation, in Maskwacis, AB. She is the daughter of Paul and Luci Johnson, and granddaughter of Chris Johnson, Ginger Wildcat, late Fred Hodgson, and late Grace Swampy. She completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology with Dr. Regna Darnell and Haudenosaunee Scholar Dr. Susan Hill and her MA in History at Western University in London, Ontario. She is also an alumna of the University of Alberta where she completed her BA in Anthropology and History with Distinction. Currently, she is the one of the Co-Research Directors at the Canadian Mountain Network (CMN) alongside Dr. Murray Humphries from McGill University. CMN is housed at the UofA and will transition to Braiding Knowledges Canada (BKC) in July of 2024 where she will continue with Dr. Humphries to braid Indigenous and Western Knowledge Systems together. Dr. Johnson/Dr. J is also an Adjunct Professor with the Faculty of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.


  • Collaborator

    Kayla holds a Bachelor of Native Studies and a Masters of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from the University of Alberta. Her professional areas of focus include Indigenous librarianship, Indigenous data sovereignty, and embedded librarianship with Indigenous communities. Prior to her current role, she was an Indigenous academic resident at the University of Alberta Libraries, where she primarily worked in the Digital Initiatives unit. Kayla has previously been an instructor for the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta, where she co-taught and created LIS 598: Indigenous Library and Information Studies (LIS) in a Canadian Context. Kayla is currently the Acting Head of X̱wi7x̱wa Library and formerly the Program Manager for the Indigitization program. Kayla is the Indigenous Programs and Services Librarian for the X̱wi7x̱wa Library at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She works with Indigenous communities both on and off the UBC campus and collaborates with stakeholders about library services.


  • Collaborator

    Scott Smallwood is a sound artist, composer, and sound performer who creates works inspired by discovered textures and forms, through a practice of listening, field recording, and sonic improvisation. He designs experimental electronic instruments and software, as well as sound installations and site-specific performance scenarios. Important to his process is exploring the subtleties of sonic texture through gradual transformations of timbre, particularly with sounds that may have originated from specific recordings of objects or spaces. His compositional and improvisational work makes use of space explicitly, and often involves multiple channel environments, found sounds, and non-conventional instrumentation. He works in a variety of sound and music genres, including instrumental concert and chamber music, electroacoustic music, sound art and installation, improvisatory performance, and more recently, audio game development. His work has been presented worldwide, including recent presentations at SARC in Belfast, the Issue Project Room in NYC, the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, the The Hong Kong Arts Centre, and Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY. His recorded work has been released on Autumn Records, Deep Listening, Wowcool, Simple Logic, Static Caravan, and Dead Definition Records.


  • Collaborator

    Dr. Carol Williams is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in U.S. cultural history of the American West; Women’s Studies, and North American Women’s History including Indigenous Women’s History. Her PhD, completed in 1999, in U.S History and Women’s History is from Rutgers-the State University of New Jersey. She currently is Associate Professor and Chair of Women & Gender Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Southern Alberta. She has been on faculty at the University of Lethbridge since 2003. From 2008 till 2011 Williams held a nominated position as a tier II Canada Research Chair in Feminism and Gender Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. From 2001 to 2003 she was a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Houston in Texas. Williams has held research fellowships at Baylor University’s Oral history Institute and at the Montana Historical Society in Helena. The latter fellowship provided the research materials for an article on the labour of Montana women during the “great” depression.

Research Assistants

  • Yan Xue (University of Alberta)

  • Evan Curley (Dalhousie University)

  • Kebrija Leeks-Kottick (York University)

  • Catherine Bevan (University of Alberta)

  • Jesaya Tunggal (University of Alberta)

  • Lauren Menzie (University of Alberta)

  • Alex Blais (University of Alberta)