2024 Invited Speakers

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Scott Grills
Department of Sociology
Brandon University

Examining the Origins of the "Qualitatives": Interactionist Approaches to Deviance, Cross-Cultural Critiques and the Pursuit of Generic Social Process


Scott Grills is a Professor of Sociology at Brandon University, Manitoba, Canada. He is the co-author of Management Motifs: An Interactionist Approach for the Study of Organizational Interchange (2019). Recent publications include those in the areas of symbolic interactionist theory, success claiming and making, the sociology of management, and ethnographic research methods. Scott has served the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in multiple capacities, including as President in 2010/11 and as Vice-President in 2007/08.


FEATURED SPEAKER: Dan Henhawk
Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management
University of Manitoba

Dan Henhawk is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management at the University of Manitoba. His research interests revolve around Western conceptualizations, and practices, of leisure and Indigenous ways of knowing and being. More specifically, he is interested in the tensions between leisure and neo-colonialism, questions about leisure and decolonization and leisure in relation to climate change. He also has interests in auto-ethnography and narrative inquiry.


FEATURED SPEAKER: Jacqueline Low
Department of Sociology
University of New Brunswick

Dr. Jacqueline Low is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick (UNB). She is creator and director of a new Bachelor of Arts degree in Socio-Cultural Studies in Health and also serves as the director of undergraduate studies in Sociology at UNB UNB. Her areas of research expertise are qualitative methodology, symbolic interactionist theory, the sociology of health, illness, and the body, chronic illness, and disability, as well as deviant behaviour and social problems. Among her most important publications are: Low (2008) Structure, agency, and social reality in Blumerian symbolic interactionism: The influence of Georg Simmel (Symbolic Interaction), Low & Bowden (2013) The Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance (McGill-Queens University Press); Low (2019a) Unstructured and Semi-Structured Interviews in Health Research (Researching Health: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods, 3rd ed (Sage); Low (2019b) A Pragmatic Definition of the Concept of Theoretical Saturation (Sociological Focus), and Low and Hyslop-Margison (2021) Kathy Charmaz: Theory, Method, and Scholarly Identity (Symbolic Interaction). She has served since 2010 as a member of the editorial board of Symbolic Interaction and is currently an Associate Editor for the journal. She has twice been Chief Organizer of The Qualitatives, most notably for its 25th anniversary. Recently, she was part of a key note panel on Robert Park and the Chicago School hosted by the University of Salerno and gave the Distinguished Speaker lecture at the 2023 SSSI annual meeting. She is currently working on invited books chapters on the use of interpretive theory in Disability Studies and interpretive scholars use of the works of Georg Simmel.