Amy Kaler

I am a full professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. I'm currently a Killam Annual Professor for 2020-2021. 

My areas of research are eclectic, but include the social organization of gender and reproduction, families and social change, rural development in Africa, public health, feminism, and the ways people find meaning in their lives and the things they choose to do. 

I have held grants as a principal investigator from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.  I have received the annual University of Alberta Faculty of Arts Research Excellence Award at assistant, associate and full professor levels, and received the Cecile E Mactaggart Travel Award for Narrative Writing  in 2019. In 2020, in recognition of a career of distinguished scholarship, I was named a Killam Annual Professor.

I am currently working on research projects on 

• parenting workload and the long-range effects of the covid-19 pandemic

• discourses of purity and impurity circulating during the covid-19 pandemic

• the impacts of worldview-transformative programs in rural east Africa

• the history of West China Mission in Sichuan, China, an international Protestant endeavour in the first half of the 20th century

• the social history of the anti-apartheid movement in 20th century Canada

• faith-based humanitarianism and international development

• the "social shape" of the AIDS epidemic in Malawi over the last two decades

My collaborators on these projects include Susan C Watkins, Nicole Angotti, John Parkins, Julie Rak, Danielle Fuller, Enid Schatz, Brent Swallow, Michelle Maroto, Rhonda Breitkreuz,  Robin Willey, Zubia Mumtaz, Walter Kipp, JoAnn Jaffe, Margaret Frye, Ernestina Coast and Shelley Lees.