N Nichols
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 48793 |
|---|---|
| NOME | N Nichols |
| PRENOMES | N |
| SOBRENOME | Nichols |
| ASSINATURA | NICHOLS N |
| AFILIAÇÕES | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6637-8186 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 28 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 28 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2008 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Towards youth-centered information practices to support youth facing homelessness
Introduction Youth face a difficult journey once they become homeless, often struggling to navigate multiple systems. Information collection and use is a starting point to support youth accessing services. We aimed to better understand the experiences of information collection and use when accessing homelessness services for Canadian youth (18-30 years old) who have lived experience of homelessness and the community service providers (CSPs) servi…
Workarounds to Mandated Data Practices
Over the past decade, much of the infrastructure used for social service delivery in Canada has been digitized. Drawing on institutional ethnographic research practices, we undertook observational research, facilitated focus groups with twenty five key informants, and interviewed 121 leaders and workers in the child welfare and youth homelessness sectors to learn how data practices in these sectors are shaped by government-mandated infrastructure…
The social organization of structural vulnerability among people who are homeless and use drugs
Background In this article, we describe an institutional ethnographic investigation of the housing and homelessness response in one municipality in Ontario, Canada.Methods Drawing on 42 interviews with social service professionals and municipal government employees and 49 interviews with people who are or have been using municipal housing and homeless services (e.g. emergency shelters, mobile healthcare, outreach services, transitional housing), …
Indigenous workplace policies
Indigenous employment is a critical policy area in Australia, with businesses adopting targeted workplace and recruitment practices to increase their levels of Indigenous employment. However, non-Indigenous-owned Australian businesses are still struggling to meet their Indigenous employment targets, and the national gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous employment rates remains wide. Despite the increased popularity of Indigenous-specific wor…
Gender Transformation, Homelessness and Economic Precarity in Ontario, Canada
Data justice for youth in and leaving care
The digitization of social services provides the public sector with new tools to monitor and meet managerial and legislative objectives. But these practices re-shape service provision and the experiences of those receiving social welfare interventions. This article reports on results from phase one of an institutional ethnography of public sector policy, knowledge, and technology. We begin by describing our iterative mapping methodology. We then …
Homeless youth‐led activism and direct action
This article explores the involvement of youth with lived experience (LE) in activism and research aimed at addressing youth homelessness in Canada. Based within a youth‐participatory action research project in Tio'tiá:ke/Montréal, Canada, we reflect on how young people described their own activist organising, as well as the practical ways we may harness actions that homelessness youth are already doing to create communities and solidarity. The a…
Youth as Truth-Tellers and Rights-Holders
In the first pan-Canadian study on youth homelessness, 57.8% of youth reported prior involvement with child protection services. Indeed, transitions from government institutions (e.g., child/youth protection, inpatient mental health treatment, the youth justice system) represent common pathways into homelessness for youth across North America. This article examines young people’s experiences navigating youth protection services to identify instit…
Is research the new advocacy? Mobilising social science research through ‘solutions-focused advocacy’
Advocacy coalitions have played an increasingly critical role in evidence-based policy development. Despite this, little is known about how such coalitions leverage research to influence policy. Addressing this gap, this qualitative study explores how a multi-sectoral advocacy coalition seeks to shape Canadian food security policy through ‘solutions-focused advocacy’. We explore four of the coalition’s strategies: (1) shaping policymakers’ thinki…
The Social Organization of Pervasive Penality in the Lives of Young People Experiencing Homelessness
Navigating managerial and entrepreneurial reforms in research‐intensive universities
Health System Access for Precariously Housed Youth
This article builds from young people’s experiences navigating health system organizations to identify concrete institutional and policy processes that pose problems for youth experiencing or at risk of homelessness, as well as those that show promise in terms of health promotion. Our participatory youth research team explored homeless youth’s health-seeking practices, the specific barriers they face, and relations between their health-seeking ef…
Ethnography, Tactical Responsivity and Political Utility
In this article, we address issues of attribution, utility, and accountability in ethnographic research. We examine the two main analytical approaches that have structured the debate on data collection and theorization in ethnography over the last five decades: an inductivist approach, with grounded theory as its main analytic strategy; and a deductivist stance, which uses field sites to explore empirical anomalies that enable an ethnographer to …
Implementing a national policy initiative to support education for sustainable development
Full Issue
Social R&D in Four Portraits
Since 2015, Canadian practitioners and funders have been adapting research and development (R&D) principles and practices to the context of social purpose organizations (SPOs) to increase the trans-sectoral capacity to generate social innovations. As a result, Social R&D is rapidly gaining popularity among a diversified array of organizations. This article distills the findings of a mix-methods exploratory study and offers a typology of four diff…
Networks and evidence-based advocacy
Background: Timely access to relevant and trustworthy research findings is an important facilitator of research use. But the relational aspects of evidence generation, mobilisation and use have been insufficiently explored. Aims and objectives: Our aim is to describe the strategic communicative and relational work of two intermediary organisations playing thought leadership roles within a large, heterogeneous and loosely configured network compri…
The work of being well on campus
The focus of this article is the growing gap between demands for campus mental health services and the ability of Canadian universities to play a significant and positive role in student mental health promotion. This article is grounded in in-depth interviews with young people collected as part of a participatory institutional ethnographic research project. We trace from young people’s descriptions of their work to monitor and attend to their own…
Chasing Funding “To Eat Our Own Tail”
This article presents findings from a multi-site study conducted in Montréal, QC, and Toronto, ON, Canada, on “social innovation” networks, focusing on the forms of emotional and relational work that many participants described. The article explores how these tasks related to how workers in the two nonprofit “backbone” organizations described their contributions to the impacts they hoped to make. The intersections of these forms of work and parti…
Community Safety, Housing Precariousness and Processes of Exclusion
Using the alternative sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this article reveals how experiences growing up in social housing (re)produce conditions of oppression that exacerbate housing precariousness and other forms of exclusion. Data were generated through participant observation, textual analysis and in-depth qualitative interviews with Young People of Colour living in vulnerable urban neighbourhoods, designated as Neighbourhood I…
Producing youth ‘Out of sync
This article investigates intersecting institutional and policy relations that influence divergent developmental trajectories among young people. Beginning with young people’s experiential knowledge of key institutional contexts shaping their lives, the article illuminates socially organized disjunctures whereby young people come to see themselves as developmentally out of sync with institutional expectations for youth development, which organize…
The Social Organization of Access to Justice for Youth in ‘Unsafe’ Urban Neighbourhoods
Drawing on the feminist sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this article reveals how young people in a designated neighbourhood improvement area in Toronto, Canada, experience reduced access to justice. Young people’s stories about their interactions with the police in their neighbourhood ground an analysis of the dispersal of justice in large urban centres as shaped by and constitutive of the social relations of race, gender and cl…
Technologies of evidence
In this article, I investigate the social relations of evidence that transverse and connect schools, homes, the streets, and the courts. This institutional ethnography begins in the standpoints of racialised and ‘at-risk youth’ to investigate how institutional practices – embedded in and constitutive of the new relations of capital and exchange referred to as the knowledge economy – (re)produce intersecting social relations of objectification and…
Investigating the social relations of human service provision
In this article, I reflect on my experiences using institutional ethnography to support socially just policy, practice and organizational change. I focus specifically on three inter-related institutional ethnographic research projects that have informed my approach to working with social workers, shelter workers, lawyers, policy analysts, community organizers, teachers, probation officers and youth to create change. Although strategic collaborati…
Investigating the social organization of family health work
This article reports findings from focus group conversations and in-depth interviews about the things that parents do to take care of their children's health in Toronto, Canada. Our data demonstrate that within a single urban setting, parents are differently positioned to effectively find and engage existing healthcare resources. Parents' 'family health work' is shaped by systemic expectations for health and institutional literacy and inter-insti…
Community Safety, Housing Precariousness and Processes of Exclusion
Using the alternative sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this article reveals how experiences growing up in social housing (re)produce conditions of oppression that exacerbate housing precariousness and other forms of exclusion. Data were generated through participant observation, textual analysis and in-depth qualitative interviews with Young People of Colour living in vulnerable urban neighbourhoods, designated as Neighbourhood I…
Knowledge Mobilization, Collaboration, and Social Innovation
This article is a qualitative literature synthesis in the areas of community-campus collaborations, knowledge mobilization and social innovation. The article aims to be useful to people who work in academic settings, community organizations, public institutions, and government. The authors utilized a purposive sampling methodology to explore the following questions: 1. How can university-based knowledge mobilization leverage investments in higher…
Understanding the Funding Game
This paper investigates how people’s work for non-profit organizations, charities, grassroots collectives, and social justice organizations is organized by official funding processes. In my analysis, I attend to the different kinds of text-based knowledge that coordinate people’s work across the civil sector. Engaging in discussions with participants about their work, I discover how an individual’s ordinary documentary activities are articulated …
Networks and evidence-based advocacy
Background: Timely access to relevant and trustworthy research findings is an important facilitator of research use. But the relational aspects of evidence generation, mobilisation and use have been insufficiently explored. Aims and objectives: Our aim is to describe the strategic communicative and relational work of two intermediary organisations playing thought leadership roles within a large, heterogeneous and loosely configured network compri…
Chasing Funding “To Eat Our Own Tail”
This article presents findings from a multi-site study conducted in Montréal, QC, and Toronto, ON, Canada, on “social innovation” networks, focusing on the forms of emotional and relational work that many participants described. The article explores how these tasks related to how workers in the two nonprofit “backbone” organizations described their contributions to the impacts they hoped to make. The intersections of these forms of work and parti…
The Social Organization of Access to Justice for Youth in ‘Unsafe’ Urban Neighbourhoods
Drawing on the feminist sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this article reveals how young people in a designated neighbourhood improvement area in Toronto, Canada, experience reduced access to justice. Young people’s stories about their interactions with the police in their neighbourhood ground an analysis of the dispersal of justice in large urban centres as shaped by and constitutive of the social relations of race, gender and cl…
Technologies of evidence
In this article, I investigate the social relations of evidence that transverse and connect schools, homes, the streets, and the courts. This institutional ethnography begins in the standpoints of racialised and ‘at-risk youth’ to investigate how institutional practices – embedded in and constitutive of the new relations of capital and exchange referred to as the knowledge economy – (re)produce intersecting social relations of objectification and…
Gimme shelter! Investigating the social service interface from the standpoint of youth
Using institutional ethnography, I demonstrate how one young man's efforts to find housing are shaped in relation to a complex institutional maze through which the immigration, child welfare, social assistance, and sheltering systems are linked. My goal is to show how a particular person's narrative can be used to illuminate the general organisation of the bureaucratic world. In this article, I explain how youth homelessness occurs against a comp…
The Social Organization of Pervasive Penality in the Lives of Young People Experiencing Homelessness
Full Issue
Social R&D in Four Portraits
Since 2015, Canadian practitioners and funders have been adapting research and development (R&D) principles and practices to the context of social purpose organizations (SPOs) to increase the trans-sectoral capacity to generate social innovations. As a result, Social R&D is rapidly gaining popularity among a diversified array of organizations. This article distills the findings of a mix-methods exploratory study and offers a typology of four diff…
The work of being well on campus
The focus of this article is the growing gap between demands for campus mental health services and the ability of Canadian universities to play a significant and positive role in student mental health promotion. This article is grounded in in-depth interviews with young people collected as part of a participatory institutional ethnographic research project. We trace from young people’s descriptions of their work to monitor and attend to their own…
Producing youth ‘Out of sync
This article investigates intersecting institutional and policy relations that influence divergent developmental trajectories among young people. Beginning with young people’s experiential knowledge of key institutional contexts shaping their lives, the article illuminates socially organized disjunctures whereby young people come to see themselves as developmentally out of sync with institutional expectations for youth development, which organize…
Investigating the social relations of human service provision
In this article, I reflect on my experiences using institutional ethnography to support socially just policy, practice and organizational change. I focus specifically on three inter-related institutional ethnographic research projects that have informed my approach to working with social workers, shelter workers, lawyers, policy analysts, community organizers, teachers, probation officers and youth to create change. Although strategic collaborati…
Gimme shelter! Investigating the social service interface from the standpoint of youth
Using institutional ethnography, I demonstrate how one young man's efforts to find housing are shaped in relation to a complex institutional maze through which the immigration, child welfare, social assistance, and sheltering systems are linked. My goal is to show how a particular person's narrative can be used to illuminate the general organisation of the bureaucratic world. In this article, I explain how youth homelessness occurs against a comp…
Understanding the Funding Game
This paper investigates how people’s work for non-profit organizations, charities, grassroots collectives, and social justice organizations is organized by official funding processes. In my analysis, I attend to the different kinds of text-based knowledge that coordinate people’s work across the civil sector. Engaging in discussions with participants about their work, I discover how an individual’s ordinary documentary activities are articulated …
Knowledge Mobilization, Collaboration, and Social Innovation
This article is a qualitative literature synthesis in the areas of community-campus collaborations, knowledge mobilization and social innovation. The article aims to be useful to people who work in academic settings, community organizations, public institutions, and government. The authors utilized a purposive sampling methodology to explore the following questions: 1. How can university-based knowledge mobilization leverage investments in higher…
Investigating the social organization of family health work
This article reports findings from focus group conversations and in-depth interviews about the things that parents do to take care of their children's health in Toronto, Canada. Our data demonstrate that within a single urban setting, parents are differently positioned to effectively find and engage existing healthcare resources. Parents' 'family health work' is shaped by systemic expectations for health and institutional literacy and inter-insti…
Investigating the social relations of human service provision
In this article, I reflect on my experiences using institutional ethnography to support socially just policy, practice and organizational change. I focus specifically on three inter-related institutional ethnographic research projects that have informed my approach to working with social workers, shelter workers, lawyers, policy analysts, community organizers, teachers, probation officers and youth to create change. Although strategic collaborati…
Producing youth ‘Out of sync
This article investigates intersecting institutional and policy relations that influence divergent developmental trajectories among young people. Beginning with young people’s experiential knowledge of key institutional contexts shaping their lives, the article illuminates socially organized disjunctures whereby young people come to see themselves as developmentally out of sync with institutional expectations for youth development, which organize…
The Social Organization of Access to Justice for Youth in ‘Unsafe’ Urban Neighbourhoods
Drawing on the feminist sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this article reveals how young people in a designated neighbourhood improvement area in Toronto, Canada, experience reduced access to justice. Young people’s stories about their interactions with the police in their neighbourhood ground an analysis of the dispersal of justice in large urban centres as shaped by and constitutive of the social relations of race, gender and cl…
Technologies of evidence
In this article, I investigate the social relations of evidence that transverse and connect schools, homes, the streets, and the courts. This institutional ethnography begins in the standpoints of racialised and ‘at-risk youth’ to investigate how institutional practices – embedded in and constitutive of the new relations of capital and exchange referred to as the knowledge economy – (re)produce intersecting social relations of objectification and…
Community Safety, Housing Precariousness and Processes of Exclusion
Using the alternative sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this article reveals how experiences growing up in social housing (re)produce conditions of oppression that exacerbate housing precariousness and other forms of exclusion. Data were generated through participant observation, textual analysis and in-depth qualitative interviews with Young People of Colour living in vulnerable urban neighbourhoods, designated as Neighbourhood I…
Chasing Funding “To Eat Our Own Tail”
This article presents findings from a multi-site study conducted in Montréal, QC, and Toronto, ON, Canada, on “social innovation” networks, focusing on the forms of emotional and relational work that many participants described. The article explores how these tasks related to how workers in the two nonprofit “backbone” organizations described their contributions to the impacts they hoped to make. The intersections of these forms of work and parti…
Networks and evidence-based advocacy
Background: Timely access to relevant and trustworthy research findings is an important facilitator of research use. But the relational aspects of evidence generation, mobilisation and use have been insufficiently explored. Aims and objectives: Our aim is to describe the strategic communicative and relational work of two intermediary organisations playing thought leadership roles within a large, heterogeneous and loosely configured network compri…
The work of being well on campus
The focus of this article is the growing gap between demands for campus mental health services and the ability of Canadian universities to play a significant and positive role in student mental health promotion. This article is grounded in in-depth interviews with young people collected as part of a participatory institutional ethnographic research project. We trace from young people’s descriptions of their work to monitor and attend to their own…
Implementing a national policy initiative to support education for sustainable development
Full Issue
Social R&D in Four Portraits
Since 2015, Canadian practitioners and funders have been adapting research and development (R&D) principles and practices to the context of social purpose organizations (SPOs) to increase the trans-sectoral capacity to generate social innovations. As a result, Social R&D is rapidly gaining popularity among a diversified array of organizations. This article distills the findings of a mix-methods exploratory study and offers a typology of four diff…
Navigating managerial and entrepreneurial reforms in research‐intensive universities
Health System Access for Precariously Housed Youth
This article builds from young people’s experiences navigating health system organizations to identify concrete institutional and policy processes that pose problems for youth experiencing or at risk of homelessness, as well as those that show promise in terms of health promotion. Our participatory youth research team explored homeless youth’s health-seeking practices, the specific barriers they face, and relations between their health-seeking ef…
Ethnography, Tactical Responsivity and Political Utility
In this article, we address issues of attribution, utility, and accountability in ethnographic research. We examine the two main analytical approaches that have structured the debate on data collection and theorization in ethnography over the last five decades: an inductivist approach, with grounded theory as its main analytic strategy; and a deductivist stance, which uses field sites to explore empirical anomalies that enable an ethnographer to …
Youth as Truth-Tellers and Rights-Holders
In the first pan-Canadian study on youth homelessness, 57.8% of youth reported prior involvement with child protection services. Indeed, transitions from government institutions (e.g., child/youth protection, inpatient mental health treatment, the youth justice system) represent common pathways into homelessness for youth across North America. This article examines young people’s experiences navigating youth protection services to identify instit…
Is research the new advocacy? Mobilising social science research through ‘solutions-focused advocacy’
Advocacy coalitions have played an increasingly critical role in evidence-based policy development. Despite this, little is known about how such coalitions leverage research to influence policy. Addressing this gap, this qualitative study explores how a multi-sectoral advocacy coalition seeks to shape Canadian food security policy through ‘solutions-focused advocacy’. We explore four of the coalition’s strategies: (1) shaping policymakers’ thinki…
The Social Organization of Pervasive Penality in the Lives of Young People Experiencing Homelessness
Data justice for youth in and leaving care
The digitization of social services provides the public sector with new tools to monitor and meet managerial and legislative objectives. But these practices re-shape service provision and the experiences of those receiving social welfare interventions. This article reports on results from phase one of an institutional ethnography of public sector policy, knowledge, and technology. We begin by describing our iterative mapping methodology. We then …
Homeless youth‐led activism and direct action
This article explores the involvement of youth with lived experience (LE) in activism and research aimed at addressing youth homelessness in Canada. Based within a youth‐participatory action research project in Tio'tiá:ke/Montréal, Canada, we reflect on how young people described their own activist organising, as well as the practical ways we may harness actions that homelessness youth are already doing to create communities and solidarity. The a…
The social organization of structural vulnerability among people who are homeless and use drugs
Background In this article, we describe an institutional ethnographic investigation of the housing and homelessness response in one municipality in Ontario, Canada.Methods Drawing on 42 interviews with social service professionals and municipal government employees and 49 interviews with people who are or have been using municipal housing and homeless services (e.g. emergency shelters, mobile healthcare, outreach services, transitional housing), …
Indigenous workplace policies
Indigenous employment is a critical policy area in Australia, with businesses adopting targeted workplace and recruitment practices to increase their levels of Indigenous employment. However, non-Indigenous-owned Australian businesses are still struggling to meet their Indigenous employment targets, and the national gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous employment rates remains wide. Despite the increased popularity of Indigenous-specific wor…
Political science (24 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Public relations (13 obras) · Ethnography (11 obras) · Homelessness and Social Issues (11 obras) · Psychology (10 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Criminology (8 obras) · Politics (8 obras) · Social science (7 obras)