Jessica Fields, PhD

Professor
Health and Society, University of Toronto Scarborough
Sociology, University of Toronto Graduate Faculty
Vice-Dean, Faculty Affairs, Equity, and Success, UTSC
E-mail: jessica.fields@utoronto.ca

Biosketch

Jessica Fields is an ethnographer whose research focuses on what it means to pursue knowledge as a means to sexual health; to approach sexuality as knowable; and to pursue an understanding of sexuality through formal education. In her 2008 monograph, Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality and a series of articles, Fields considers the ways sexuality education routinely exacerbates the struggles of already disadvantaged young people—girls, low-income students, students of color, and sexual nonconformists—while enfranchising the more privileged. Working with Jen Gilbert (PI; York University), Fields co-leads the Beyond Bullying Project, a storytelling project that considers what’s required for sexuality education to open up to the uncertainty, discomfort, and pleasure of learning from and about LGBTQ sexuality. Beyond Bullying began in the US with Ford Foundation funding and as a collaboration with Laura Mamo and Nancy Lesko.

Covid brought a new focus to Fields’ work: how a global pandemic becomes a condition in which queer, trans, racialized, and young people imagine and craft selves. As Principal Investigator (PI), Fields works with Sarah Williams (Co-Investigator) and James Gibb to co-lead QueerCOVID-TO, a study of the mental health of LGBTQTSIA+ people in Toronto during the COVID-19 global pandemic (funder: University of Toronto COVID Action Initiative Fund). Fields is also co-PI on 4theRecord, a study of risk in the lives of queer and racialized young women in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (funder: Canadian Tri-Council New Frontiers in Research Fund; PI: Sarah Flicker, York University).

Fields’ collaborations with students have led to a series of publications on methodology and pedagogy. In the book she is now writing, Problems We Pose: Feeling Differently about Qualitative Research (University of Minnesota Press), Fields explores emotion as an opportunity to reimagine feeling and understanding in research.

Qualitative Teaching

Qualitative Methods, Department of Sociology Graduate Program

Research Interests

Sexuality, education, youth, gender and race

Selected Publications

Fields, Jessica, Stephanie Johnson, Bex MacFife, Patricia Roach, and era steinfeld. 2021. “Embodied Engagements: Body Mapping in a Sociology of Sexuality Classroom.” Teaching Sociology—Special Issue on Teaching Sexualities. 49(3): 256-66. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0092055X211022470

Mamo, Laura, Jessica Fields, Jen Gilbert, and David Pereira. 2021. “Orienting Toward Possibility: Girls and Bisexuality at School.” Health Promotion Practice—Special Issue on Critical Narrative Intervention, edited by Alice Fiddian-Green and Aline Gubrium. 22(2):23S-32S. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15248399211045019

O’Quinn, Jamie, and Jessica Fields. 2020. “The Future of Evidence: Queerness in Progressive Visions of Sexuality Education.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 17(2): 175-87.

Gilbert, Jen, Jessica Fields, Laura Mamo, and Nancy Lesko. 2019. “Tending Toward Friendship: LGBTQ Sexualities in School.” Sexualities 22(3): 418–435

Gilbert, Jen, Jessica Fields, Laura Mamo, and Nancy Lesko. 2018. “Intimate Possibilities: The Beyond Bullying Project and Stories of LGBTQ Sexuality and Gender in U.S. Schools.” Harvard Educational Review 88(2): 163-83.

Fields, Jessica. Fall/Winter 2016. “The Racialized Erotics of Participatory Research: A Queer Feminist Consideration.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly—Special Issue on Queer Methods. 44(3/4):31-50.