Sophie Tamas

Biography

My education began in Creative Writing – particularly playwriting. My undergraduate and MA theses looked at dating, courtship, storytelling, and feminist activism in a religious minority community. This was followed by eight life- and research-altering years as a stay-at-home mom and active volunteer in small-town non-profit social services. I remain active in this sector, as a board member for agencies serving youth, seniors, low-income families, and people with developmental disabilities. My PhD research examined the long-term impact of domestic abuse, using arts-based research methods to critique the dominant ‘recovery’ paradigm. It was followed by a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in Emotional Geography at Queen’s University, during which I studied scrapping – in scrapyards and in scrapbooks – as methods of redeeming value from loss. As a Banting Fellow in Geography and Canadian Studies, I have created an online dynamic atlas and trauma scrapbook to document the impact of leaving abuse (at postscrap.org), to be launched in early 2015.

Research Interest

Personal narrative and creative arts at the intersection of academic, aesthetic, and therapeutic discourses. Community engagement, knowledge mobilization and social justice praxis. Interdisciplinary critical qualitative research methodologies and epistemologies. Emotional geographies of trauma and domestic abuse. Gender, identity, memory, and loss as mediated by objects and spaces. Visual testimonies and collaborative witnessing in digital communities. Feminist, postmodern, poststructural, non-representational, and psychoanalytic theory.