Faculty and Research Associates

Amber Gazso is Professor of Sociology in the School of Culture, Media, and Society and is excited to be “home.” Having grown up in Abbotsford, Amber completed her BA in Criminal Justice (minor in Sociology) at UFV and had the pleasure of teaching at UFV as a sessional instructor while completing her PhD at the University of Alberta. Amber arrives again at UFV after spending some time with the Department of Sociology at York University (Toronto, Ontario).

As a feminist sociologist, Amber is passionate about researching with people to understand their relationships with social policies of the welfare state. The bulk of Amber’s research is qualitative, with a particular bias toward interviewing and discourse analysis. Working with low income single individuals and parents, most of Amber’s research seeks to understand how they maintain their eligibility for welfare at the same time they lead busy lives, e.g. managing their own and others’ health, providing caregiving for dependents, and sustaining supportive relationships with friends and family, etc. Her most recent book, Substances, Welfare, and Social Relations: Breaking Stigma, Pursuing Hope (November 2023, U of T Press), is exemplary of her research foci and her excitement about using multiple qualitative methods. It highlights the everyday life experiences of Torontonians who follow the rules and regulations of their welfare receipt whilst also managing their use of drugs or alcohol and calls for a shift in thinking in how we imagine our futures together.

Amber’s areas of research specialization are also represented in her co-edited book with Dr. Karen Kobayashi, Continuity and Innovation: Canadian Families in the New Millennium (2018, Nelson) and her co-authored book with Dr. Katherine Bischoping, Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences: Conversation, Narrative, and Discourse Strategies (2016, Sage). Her research is featured in journals like Critical Social Policy, Citizenship Studies, Journal of Family Issues, Social Problems, the Canadian Review of Sociology, and the International Journal of Social Policy.

New research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, explores how Ontarians experiencing low income manage their relationships not just with Ontario Works (welfare) but simultaneously navigate additional relationships, and so rules and regulations, with addictions and mental health, child welfare, and criminal justice systems.

Amber is most excited about teaching sociology in general, and sociology of gender and family relations, critical social policy analysis, social inequality, and qualitative methods specifically.

If Amber had chosen a path other than academia earlier in her life, she would be only hanging out with horses and competing in international Grand Prix Dressage.