My research interests are in the areas of the political economy/ecology of corporate capitalism, social movements and social change, and critical social theory and method. I have been a member of the Sociology Department at the University of Victoria 1981. With a fabulous group of colleagues, I established the Interdisciplinary Program in Social Justice Studies at the University of Victoria in 2008 and served as its director from 2008 to 2012. I am also a founding faculty member of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cultural, Political and Social Thought, and served as its director for part of the 1990s. My books include The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci, Organizing the 1%, Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power blocks Energy Democracy, Organizing the 1% (with J.P. Sapinski), Expose, Oppose, Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice, A World to Win: Contemporary Social Movements and Counter-Hegemony (with Kanchan Sarker), The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class, Corporate Power in a Globalizing World, Remaking Media (with Bob Hackett), Critical Strategies for Social Research, Challenges and Perils: Social Democracy in Neoliberal Times (with R.S. Ratner) and Organizing Dissent.

I have recently published The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci, in January, 2024. Mapping the power of the carbon-extractive corporate resource sector, a SSHRC Partnership of six universities and five civil-society organizations, ran from 2015 until 2023. I was co-director of the Partnership with Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – BC. Our Corporate Mapping Project (CMP) blended public sociology with action research, as we investigated several modalities of corporate power and influence, focusing on fossil capital, within Canada and transnationally. In the CMP’s second half we widened our lens to explore how settler-colonial capitalism has been implicated in the regime, and to promote democratic alternatives to fossil capitalism. In 2015 I completed a four-year global-sociological study, Alternative policy groups and global civil society: Networks, discourses and practices of counter-hegemony — a community-engaged initiative in knowledge co-creation through participatory field research, among other research methods.

(Photograph By Bruce Stotesbury, Victoria Times Colonist)

The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci, an edited collection of 25 chapters charting Gramsci’s life and times, his key theoretical contributions and the continuing stream of Gramscian scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, was published in January 2024 by Elgar. The weblink, which includes access to the introductory chapter is here.

Having published Refusing Ecocide: From Fossil Capitalism to a Liveable World in November 2024, I will be working on a manuscript that reflects on CB Macpherson’s 1965 Massey Lectures, The Real World of Democracy, and the transformations that have ensued in the six subsequent decades. ‘The real world of democracy in the 21st century’ is the working title.

I am honoured to have received this award for UVic’s Faculty of Social Sciences, in 2024.