Ondine Park

Assistant Professor

Power, Conflict and Ideas, Sociology

Office: ART 307
Email: ondine.park@ubc.ca

Research Summary

Cultural environmental sociology; social and cultural theory; social imaginaries; space and spatialization, time and temporality; aesthetic sociology, cultural representations and practices; urban and suburban studies; sociology of food.

Courses & Teaching

Environmental sociology; sociology of food; contemporary sociological theory; cultural sociology; introduction to sociology

Degrees

PhD, University of Alberta
MA, Lancaster University (UK)
BA, UBC (Vancouver)

Research Interests & Projects

I explore social imaginaries and spatiotemporalities, considering the disavowed, uncanny, and shifting foundations of ordinary social relations through theoretical interpretation and critique of cultural representations, practices, and forms, and sometimes through research-creation. My current investigations include aseasonalization, exhaustion, and loneliness — extraordinary consequences of Capitalist modernity, treated largely as ordinary; as well as cannibalism and the multiverse — fundamental bases of ordinary social life that are disavowed and projected as extraordinary.

Selected Publications & Presentations

Davidson, TK, and O Park, eds. 2025. Seasonal Sociology, 2nd ed Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (Second edition of PROSE Award-winning introduction to Sociology.)

Park, O. 2025. “Multiversality in Children’s Picture Books: Portals to Many Worlds.” In Entering the Multiverse: Perspectives on Alternate Universes and Parallel Worlds, edited by Paul Booth, 175-186. NY: Routledge.

Park, O. 2025. “Wedding Season: The White Wedding as a Cultural Ritual of Heteronormativity.” In Seasonal Sociology, 2nd ed., edited by TK Davidson and O Park, 307-324. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Park, O. 2025. “Menu-Planning — Making Friends With Cannibalism: Arting to Think With and Through Research” invited talk. Research Creation and the Colonizer’s Model of the World, International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, March, Edmonton.

Park, O. 2025. “Cannibalism, Social Life, and the Edibility of Friends and Strangers in Television Cartoons.” Popular Culture and American Culture Association Conference, April, New Orleans, USA.

Milbrandt, T, and O Park. 2023. A Multi-dimensional Social Inquiry into the Loneliness Problem: Technological Mediation, Urbanization, and Neoliberal Individualism, research report. Ottawa, ON: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-tpaj-mp55

Park, O, and A Winkler. 2017, April. “De/fence” multi-media art-as-research installation. In InToxic: Research Creation Exhibition, curated by the Intermedia Research Studio. Edmonton: Latitude 53 Gallery.

Park, O. 2016. “Home (Moving) Memory,” Transcultural: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies 8(1): 172-73.

Park, O. 2016. “Suburban Home: The Phantasmagoric Interior and the Ghostly Individual.” In Sociology of Home: Belonging, Community, and Place in the Canadian Context, ed. Gillian Anderson, Joseph G. Moore, and Laura Suski, 65-85. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc.

Park, O, and TK Davidson. 2015. “The Trouble with Bacon.” This Magazine Sep/Oct: 10-11.

Park, O. 2014, Mar-Aug. Figuring the Suburban Imaginary: a multimedia, intermediated exhibit on the suburb, solo-curated gallery exhibit. Intermedia Research Studio, University of Alberta.

Davidson, TK, O Park, and R Shields, eds. 2011. Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Park, O. 2011. “Ambivalence and Strangeness in the Everyday Utopianism of Suburbia,” Public Journal 43: 110-24.

Bondarchuk, L, and O Park. 2010. “Community Collaboration in Media and Arts Activism: A Case Study.” In Understanding Community Media, edited by K Howley, 151-160. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.