Jacqueline Kennelly

My research touches on youth cultures, citizenship, democracy, social inclusion and exclusion, globalization, neoliberalism, social movements, urban sociology, and education. I have expertise on homelessness, the urban impacts of mega-events, youth civic engagement, and gender. My research is qualitative, involving traditional (e.g. interviewing, focus groups, participant-observation) and non-traditional (e.g. visual methods, spatial methods, film-making) methods.

My current research focus is on the experiences of homeless young people with civic engagement, and the supports they need to successfully transition out of homelessness. I have recently completed a Spencer Foundation New Civics Initiative grant that explores the civic engagement experiences of homeless youth in Ottawa, and I am currently working in collaboration with the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa and A Way Home Ottawa on a Mitacs-Accelerate funded research project examining the best ways to end youth homelessness in Ottawa.

Before starting my faculty position at Carleton University, I completed a SSHRC-funded post-doctoral fellowship with the University of Cambridge, where I studied the impacts of the Vancouver (2010) and London (2012) Olympics on low-income young people. I continued that research with the support of a SSHRC Standard Research Grant, and have just published a book on the entirety of the study, entitled Olympic Exclusions: Youth, Poverty and Social Legacies (Routledge, 2016).

Previous research includes an ethnography of youth activist communities in Canada, published in 2011 by Palgrave-MacMillan in a book entitled Citizen Youth: culture, activism, and agency in a neoliberal era; and (with Jo-Anne Dillabough) an ethnographic investigation of urban low-income young people’s subcultural responses to education and welfare retrenchment, ghettoization of the urban poor, and emergent forms of youth citizenship. Findings from that study were published as a book, entitled Lost youth in the global city: class, culture, and the urban imaginary (Routledge, 2010).