Katherine Bischoping

York University · Department of Sociology

Talk is one of the main resources available to qualitative researchers. It offers rich, meaningful data that can provide real insights and new perspectives. But once you have the data how do you select an appropriate means of analysis? How do you ensure that the approach you adopt is the best for your project and your data? The book will help you...

This analysis examines how the narrative self of a person with dementia is maintained by family members in a small rural Nova Scotian community. In the literature, the expectation is often that rurality is a condition of isolation, distance from family and limited health resources. However, drawing on three years of ethnographic and interviewing re...

Scholars studying China’s generations have shown keen interest in devising new generational labels to identify characteristics of particular age cohorts. This analysis, based on 41 interviews with Chinese participants, departs from this common research strategy, first, by positioning generational labels used by ordinary Chinese, rather than academi...

To people familiar with Confucian teachings about revering elders, it may be surprising that, over the last decade and a half, a discourse has emerged and spread widely in China in which elders are denigrated as out-of-date and corrupt. Using newspaper articles, commentaries and videos, this paper first traces the emergence of intergenerational con...

K. Bischoping, R. Abdelbaki, K. Ahmed, K. Banasiak, and D. Gül Kaya (2015). “Unsettling Orientalism: Edward W. Said’s (1978) book and its covers”. Presented at Unsettling Colonial Modernity: Islamicate Contexts in Focus, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, April 2015.

This commentary reflects on articles by Liu et al., (2022) on the formation of an ethnoburb of Albany, New Zealand and by Liu (2022) on how queer psychology has misrepresented Sinophone queers. Drawing upon a sociological disciplinary standpoint, it identifies a theme of anti-essentialism that these works share, and suggests methods that would be h...

This analysis examines how the narrative self of a person with dementia is maintained by family members in a small rural Nova Scotian community. In the literature, the expectation is often that rurality is a condition of isolation, distance from family and limited health resources. However, drawing on three years of ethnographic and interviewing re...

This paper is based on work history interviews with a group of nine Toronto theatre workers covering a three-year period. During the interviews, participants did not spontaneously mention 13.1 per cent of their jobs in the creative cultural sector. Because forgotten work fails to register in surveys attempting to assess cultural workers’ contributi...

In 1963, Chairman Mao made a national hero of an ordinary soldier named Lei Feng, said to have been inspired by collectivism to do countless selfless deeds. Sceptical observers inside and outside China disparage the persistent Lei Feng legend, judging it to be a laughably fraudulent construct of the Communist Party. We take this contrast as an oppo...

Using examples from qualitative health research and from my childhood experience of reading a poem about a boy devoured by a lion (Belloc, 1907), I expand on a framework for reflexivity developed in Bischoping and Gazso (2016). This framework is unique in first synthesizing works from multidisciplinary narrative analysis research in order to arrive...

In Canada, social scientists are accountable to ethical guidelines, including the minimization of harm. Simultaneously, they are accountable to an academic community. But what of those moments in the researcher-participant relationship when these principles clash? They have at times done so resoundingly in our careers as qualitative interviewers, e...

Over the last decade, sometimes violent conflicts have erupted between generations in China over who should have a seat on a crowded bus. Through a small story approach to an extended sequence of Chinese bus stories, this study examines how elder-blaming comes to be instantiated in talk-in-interaction. The analysis elaborates Deppermann's finding t...

This research project begins with a curiosity about the ways in which visual imagery can be used to unsettle Orientalist discourse. We draw on Edward W. Said’s foundational definition of this discourse as one that dichotomizes the so-called West and Orient, claiming that the so-called West offers a standpoint from which an objective, knowing gaze c...

Introduction to a special issue of Oral History Forum d'histoire orale, co-edited with Yumi Ishii

In 1963, Chairman Mao singled out for national hero status a man named Lei Feng, an ordinary soldier said to have done countless selfless deeds in expression of his collectivist spirit. In China, Lei Feng’s iconic status has been largely maintained, bolstered by the continuing circulation of his diary passages and photographs illustrating his kindl...

The advent of women MMA combatants suggests that opportunities have broadened for women to engage in sporting activities hitherto monopolized by men. We discern three discourses through which women’s MMA performances can be read. First, a "Girl Power" discourse claims that women’s inherent power permits them to move easily into men’s realms. Second...

In this paper, we investigate Chinese generations’ memories of Lei Feng (1940-1962), a communist national role model famed for his countless everyday acts of serving others in a collectivist spirit. Using interviews with forty-one participants ranging from 18 to 81, we argue that four Chinese generations, as defined by their age (and education), ha...

Discipline and Punish revolves around the demise of a brief impulse to develop a juridical subject. We employ cover designs of this book from around the world as lenses through which to focus on how Foucault links visuality to justice. From examining covers showing the envisioning of “model men” that justify the inspection of others, we move to cov...

A special issue of Oral History Forum d'histoire orale, co-edited with Yumi Ishii, University of Tokyo.

Bringing together international contributors from a range of disciplines including anthropology, clinical psychology, history, history of ideas, religious studies, social psychology, and sociology, the book explores how scholars, students, and professionals engaged with violence deal with the inevitable emotional stresses and vicarious trauma they...

Many creative workers are without the contractual clarity and safeguards bestowed by collective agreements or labour legislation, and encounter a host of health and safety issues as a result. This study is based on a sample of eight Toronto-based theatre artists who had worked together on a 2008 production, and whose careers in the subsequent three...

Even while they advocate for qualitative, interpretive approaches to understanding panic disorder, sociologists and feminist geographers have taken the statistics on it at face value, conducting research with women because panic has been reported to be a gender-specific problem. We still lack a sociology that effectively considers men’s experience...

L'histoire des peuples autochtones ne figure pas parmi les sujets qui sont traités dans la recherche comparée en génocide. Les auteures examinent l'approche conceptuelle qui a conduit à cette lacune en s'attardant à la terminologie employée et à la distinction qu'impose la typologie du génocide entre génocide idéologique et génocide provoqué par l'...

Genocide instructors in the social sciences speak little of how their pedagogy should address students' emotions, and even less of their own emotional states. I provide a personal narrative about my teaching experiences that illustrates the issues that instructors may face and the significance of addressing them. The narrative is analyzed using thr...

University students' practices of reading required course materials have rarely been studied systematically outside the laboratory and are given short shrift in course evaluation questionnaires. This study exam- ines, first, the reasons why a sample of instructors at a large university create selections of course readings and the factors, both peda...

ABSTRACT The experiences of indigenous peoples have been left outside the framework of comparative genocide research. We first discuss conceptual reasons for this omission, focusing on the role of genocide definitions, ideological vs. developmental distinctions in genocide typologies, and the emphasis in genocide typologies on the motivations of pe...

This example of a reflective dialogue was written by a university instructor and five students who had completed her Sociological Understandings of Genocide class. In this dialogue, they identify numerous ways that silences about race affect relations among course participants, curricular choices and the field of genocide studies. The authors also...

This example of a reflective dialogue was written by a university instructor and five students who had completed her Sociological Understandings of Genocide class. In this dialogue, they identify numerous ways that silences about race affect relations among course participants, curricular choices and the field of genocide studies. The authors also...

Holocaust and genocide researchers are engaged in a vigorous debate concerning the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the appropriateness of comparing this event to others. They concur, however, in criticizing comparisons to the Holocaust made by activists, characterizing these comparisons as carelessly reasoned and self-interested. We use a U.S. nati...

Holocaust-knowledge surveys attracted considerable public attention in 1993, when media reports stated that 22% of the American public appeared to deny the existence of the Holocaust. Once this disturbing result was explained by question-wording experiments (experiments that exposed difficulties with the wording of the questions), public-opinion re...

The Review of Higher Education - Volume 21, Number 2, Winter 1998

Three elements of discourse about Holocaust denial after a Holocaust denial advertisement appeared in a campus newspaper are studied using a survey of a convenience sample of students and in-depth qualitative interviews. First, the level of acceptance of the Holocaust denial message was found to be minimal, despite findings that knowledge about the...

We focus first on the changing nature of skill–job mismatch among post-secondary graduates, using longitudinal data to assess the impact of gender, socioeconomic status, field of study, and other factors, on mismatch. Second, we provide a detailed comparison between college and university graduates to determine whether predictors of mismatch are id...

The effects of generation, education, ethnicity, and gender on Holocaust knowledge are explored, using data from a United States national survey, a university student survey and qualitative interviews with university students. Knowledge levels are greatest among more educated respondents, respondents whose political coming of age was during the Hol...

This dissertation consists of three papers in Holocaust and genocide studies. The first, Social Influences on Holocaust Knowledge, explores the relationships between a survey measure of Holocaust knowledge and generation, education, ethnicity, and gender. The data come from a United States national sample survey of 491 respondents, a University of...

Gender differences in conversation topics were first systematically studied in 1922 by Henry Moore, who theorized that the gender differences in topic choice he observed in a field observation study would persist over time, as they were manifestations of men's and women's “original natures.” In this paper, I report a 1990 replication of Moore's stu...

This paper reports on a study of estimation of monthly mean phosphorus loadings, using daily readings from the Niagara river for 1975-1982. Two alternatives to the current method of accounting for missing data are proposed from finite population sampling theory.

KEY WORDS: Qualitative methods, survey methods This research is part of a larger project in which I study ways that people understand and interpret the Holocaust--that is, what they regard as its causes, what frameworks they use to compare the Holocaust with other events, and how much they know about the Holocaust. In this paper, I am turning away...