Dr. Jane Helleiner

Please see Research Page for current research projects and publications

Dr. Jane Helleiner has wide ranging interests and has enjoyed supervising graduate theses/major research papers on a diverse set of topics.  While she is open to supervision in many areas of critical sociology, she is especially keen to work with graduate students who are interested in developing their expertise in the broad areas of racism/antiracism, migration, border studies, gender or any combination of these sub-fields. Jane Helleiner has published widely on Irish research that she began in the 1980s. Her research there focused on the topics of racism, state policy and lived (gendered and generationed) minority experience. A book based on this long term project  titled Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture (University of Toronto Press), was chosen as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine in 2001. Jane Helleiner has also published on subsequent Canadian-based work that examined how differently racialized childhood were historically constructed in Canadian federal parliamentary discourses. Her most recent SSHRC standard research grant (2001-05) has led to her current publishing in the area of border studies. The present work is drawing upon interviews conducted with people who grew up in Canadian Niagara border communities and newspaper articles from the Niagara Falls Review to reconstruct and analyse everyday Canadian border life in the context of a re-structuring North America. The work published so far has focused on memories of childhood border crossings, regional and (bi)national identities, and the experience of young people in tourism work. Jane Helleiner has presented papers on other border-related topics including perceptions of racial profiling, experiences of post 9/11 securitization and local knowledge of unauthorized border crossings. Jane Helleiner has employed a range of qualitative methods in her varied research projects. These have included participant observation, interviewing, discourse analysis and archival work.