Michelle Szabo

Michelle Szabo is Professor of Sociology and Community Wellness at Sheridan.

She is passionate about offering tools from Nonviolent Communication for Social Justice, Equitable Mindfulness and Authentic Relating to help people connect more deeply with both themselves and others. She believes these tools can help us all navigate an increasingly polarized social and political landscape in a way that recognizes deeply entrenched patterns of inequity and power while also honouring the humanity in all of us. She is committed to the lifelong learning required to create anti-oppressive/anti-racist spaces in college classes where all students can feel deeply seen, heard, valued, represented and able to flourish. She has trained with, and continues to find inspiration from, leaders in this work such as Roxanne Manning and Holistic Resistance.

Michelle created and teaches one of the first for-credit post-secondary courses on Mental Health, Community Wellbeing & Social Justice in Canada. The syllabus can be found at: https://ulysses.sheridanc.on.ca/coutline/coutlineview_sal.jsp?appver=sal&subjectCode=SOCS&courseCode=28658GD&version=2023090500&sec=0&reload=true

In addition to her teaching role, Michelle has over 12 years of experience in qualitative interviewing, data analysis, academic writing and editing. She is currently conducting research on the outcomes of a program that shares tools for fostering intimacy and connection with formerly incarcerated women.

Specific Subject Specialties: Empathy, emotional resilience, conflict and connection; Critical/Anti-Oppressive/Anti-Racist Pedagogy; Gender and food habits; Masculinities; Consumer culture; Political economy of the global food system; Gender theory; Work-life balance and food habits; the sociology of gender, the sociology of consumption; and the sociology of food.

In addition to numerous other publications, Michelle co-edited the international, scholarly collection, "Food, Masculinities and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives" (Bloomsbury 2017). She was a 2014-2016 SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Toronto.