Gary Kinsman
Gary Kinsman (born 1955 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian sociologist. He is one of Canada’s leading academics on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. In 1987, he wrote one of the key Canadian texts on LGBT social history, Regulation of Desire, reprinted in 1995. In 2000, he edited and co-authored a second work, on Canadian federal government surveillance of marginal and dissident political and social groups, Whose National Security? A professor of sociology at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Kinsman’s research and publication focuses primarily on the sociological perspectives of LGBT issues. Kinsman is also a social activist on feminist, labor union, social justice and anti-poverty issues. Kinsman was a writer for The Body Politic and a central figure in the publication of the successor magazine Rites. He helped found Gays and Lesbians Against the Right Everywhere and the Lesbian and Gay Pride Day Committee of Toronto. In Sudbury, he was one of the organizer’s of the city’s first-ever Sudbury Pride event in 1997.
-
Sociology for Changing the World
Social Movements/Social Research
This book for activists and researchers on building connections between social movements and social research sets out practical ways activists can map the social relations of struggle they are engaged in and produce knowledge for more effective forms of activism for changing the world. Grounded in political activist ethnography, this work does not see social movements as “objects” to be studied from the outside. Rather they are to be analyzed from the standpoint of insiders’ knowledge and based on the daily struggles the social movements are engaged in. Sociology for Changing the World allows people to learn how to do sociology for social transformation.