Sociology seemed to find its way into Deana Simonetto’s life by chance. Enrolled at Carleton University to pursue the interdisciplinary Criminology and Criminal Justice program, she was required to specialize in one discipline, either Law, Psychology, or Sociology. She chose law, but the courses failed to capture her interest. However, she eagerly attended every sociology class, feeling as though she had discovered the language and framework to understand the world around her. Realizing her true passion, Dr. Simonetto switched her focus to sociology.
Throughout her career, she has used her sociological lens to focus on issues of crime, deviance, and violence and gender, mostly in the context of sports. We had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Simonetto recently to find out more about her teaching and research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Can you talk about your current role(s) at UBCO? What do you find enjoyable about them and what do you find challenging?
I find it really enjoyable teaching the students from here. Being from Ontario and moving, I feel like I’m learning so much from them about Kelowna, the people here, and BC more generally. As an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of History and Sociology, I teach mostly the third-year qualitative methods course, the sociology of sport, and a course on gendered violence. All three of these courses, I love to teach for different reasons. For example, I have taught qualitative research methods for the past eight years. The course can be challenging to teach, as students do their own original research. Meaning there is a lot going on with each student as I oversee their projects. But it is so rewarding to see their final projects after eight months and seeing them be proud of their work.
Teaching about sports and physical cultures with a sociological lens to second year students is fun because it challenges students to see sports from a different perspective. Sports have the incredible power to unite people as we see every two years at the summer and winter Olympics, often igniting a strong sense of national identity among citizens. In the course, we discuss how sport upholds dominant social structures, norms, and values, but also the ways unsavory, reprehensible, or immoral acts that occur in sport may be ritually tolerated by people or embraced as thrilling. Sports highlight the inequalities and conflicts we see in our everyday lives. For example, we discuss current events like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles speaking out about mental health, the use of Indigenous mascots, sex testing in the Olympics, transgender athletes, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, the “concussion crisis”, doping in sports, and the abuse in Canadian Sports and the call for a national inquiry. This helps students see the larger role of sports in our society and what sports tell us about our culture.
Can you describe your teaching philosophy?
My teaching philosophy is anchored in the belief that teaching and learning are interactive processes. What makes me an effective teacher is that I am also a learner. I continually strive to improve my teaching by learning from my students, colleagues, mentors, teaching assistants, as well as taking courses and workshops.
At the core of my teaching philosophy is the firm belief that the best way to learn sociology is to do sociology. In my courses, I provide in-class activities, short applied learning tasks, and creative assignments (for example a blog about a sporting event) to get students to engage with the content. In my course on gendered violence, students create anti-violence campaigns that address both structural and interpersonal forms of violence. In my research methods class, I created mini class activities for students to practice their research skills or think through research dilemmas. I am especially proud of one class activity on ethical dilemmas in doing research. In this activity students get ethical dilemmas that emerge while doing research and are asked to explain how they would deal with that situation. Here ethics in research become less about filling out forms at the beginning of the project and more about the actualities of engaging ethics throughout the research process.
What are your research interests and what do you hope to gain/solve/better understand from your research?
My current research focuses on raising awareness about the concussion crisis in sports. I look at the ways that families of former athletes come to understand the athletes’ health post sports careers, specifically those who are suffering from brain injuries and progressive degenerative neurological diseases, like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). My work seeks to better situate the everyday experiences of family trauma and the gendered violence implicit in care work and specifically I consider the social and medical responses to brain injuries and CTE. Without reifying the medical framework, my work helps to disentangle the relationship between brain injuries, gender scripts, and intimate partner violence.
What I mean by this is we have seen an increase in men who played violent sports like football, boxing, and hockey, struggle with various symptoms related to brain injuries and progressive neurodegenerative diseases at younger ages, in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Family members have revealed their concerns over cognitive, emotional, and behavioral decline of these players. Wives identified behavioral changes that included their husbands becoming enraged, reduced positive social interactions with family members, as well as their husbands exhibiting various erratic behaviors (e.g., starting risky business ventures). In turn, many of the symptoms that are being attached to brain injuries or potential CTE are rage, anger and violence without any consideration of the social context of playing violent sports and the gender scripts of those sports. What this means for women, they see the aggressive and emotionally abusive and even physical violence as a symptom of the brain injury and as such, part of their caregiving obligations for their loved one. A chapter in the book Power Played: A Critical Criminology of Sport (UBC press) with co-authors Stacey Hannem (at WLU) and former UBCO graduate student Erica Fae Thomas, we disentangle the experience of intimate partner violence from a partner who has suffered a brain injury, by considering the larger context of playing violent sports and the medical responses to brain injuries, for example the Concussion Legacy Foundation. We show how violence has become a symptom of CTE or the long-term damage of brain injuries, which in turn makes women feel obliged to endure abuse and violence even at the cost of their own well-being.
My recent paper, published in Symbolic Interaction (co-author with former UBCO student, Michelle Tucsok), explores how the cultural production of the concussion crisis shapes the ways in which male athletes make sense of self and their masculinity in the face of their declining health due to injuries suffered in sport. In this article, we show how former athletes make sense of their declining health, specially mental health. We do this by putting it in conversation with research on aging, illness and hegemonic masculine scripts to understand men’s illness stories by attending to the temporal, medical, cultural, and identity-focused dimensions of their illness stories. This paper makes a significant contribution to understanding how experiences of brain injuries are intertwined in social processes of aging and masculinity rather than focusing on biological reasonings for behaviour associated with brain injuries.
What do you hope your students will take away from your classes?
I hope to sharpen their sociological imagination by getting them to ask critical questions about our society and how we come to know it, which often means challenging their taken-granted assumptions or “common sense” understandings of the world.
What is your proudest professional accomplishment?
I was awarded the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI) Kathy Charmaz Early-In-Career award that recognizes junior scholars’ contributions to the field of symbolic interaction and their potential. The award honors those scholars who have made significant contributions within the first ten years since the completion of their PhDs. What made receiving this award so special, is that I received it at a banquet in a lovely restaurant in Pisa, Italy surrounded by my colleagues. It felt like a truly rewarding accomplishment.
Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?
Continuing to do research and teach the next generation of folks who will need to be equipped with the skills to handle our everyday challenges and social problems, whether that be fighting environmental disasters, working on social responses to gendered violence or drug misuse/abuse, finding long-term solutions for folks experiencing poverty and homelessness, so that they are ready to be innovated and can tackle them by getting at the root causes. .
I’m not quite sure what the next big project will be, but I would love to do a project on knitting and resistance. There are international groups that knit to promote social change. For example, throughout history there have been anarchist knitting circles and different social justice groups like Wool against Weapons or Knitting Nanas against Gas. I would love to study this more.
Can you tell us something (hobbies, interests etc.) that your colleagues may not know about you?
I love to knit! Knitting to relax, knitting to learn new skills, knitting with friends. I try to take courses on knitting; not only do I find it beneficial to my knitting skills and techniques but also my approach to teaching. Watching how people teach difficult skills and techniques has given me insight into my own teaching when I’m trying to explain complex concepts and theories.