By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
A recent SFU graduate with a master’s of arts in sociology, Sarah Law currently works as the director of community engagement of the feminist science and technology lab Doing STS. She is also an organizing member of the research society Asian Indigenous Relations. She has been organizing for social and climate justice for the last eight years. The Peak sat down with Law to learn more about her work.
The following interview has been edited for concision.
What drew you to studying sociology at graduate school?
My advisor, Dr. Kyle Willmott. I wrote an undergraduate honours thesis in my last semester, also in sociology. My second reader was Kyle. I had been kind of resistant to grad school because I had a lot of anti-institutional angst in me. In my last semester, Kyle basically spent a lot of time mentoring me and cultivating my research interests. He’s the one who convinced me to do grad school with him as my advisor.
Do you think your understanding of the discipline of sociology has changed in the process of doing this master’s?
A lot of things have changed — my writing style, my relationship to my discipline. I feel quite attached to my discipline, which is not something I would ever say as an undergrad, ever. I’ve recently been finding myself in defence of what the university can do. There’s really not a lot of spaces where you’re able to do research and have that be a part of your labour, right? I still have that angst inside of me. But through this master’s program, I really came to develop immense gratitude for what grad school gave me. Like the luxury to be able to read and write, and be curious, and ask questions.
In what ways does this anti-institutional angst still stay with you?
The university has also been malleable to hyper-neoliberalization, putting profit over quality and humanity. I feel really upset that TAs and RAs are underpaid, and that the people who do the most amount of work to keep this university running — like contract workers, student workers, precariously-employed professors — face all of these structural barriers to keep the university running as a profit-centred enterprise.
My concerns have also laid in the context of what is ethical knowledge production. The university structurally is an institution of settler colonialism and capitalism, and upholds patriarchy. If you don’t have a good advisor, and even if you have a good advisor,
“Nobody can be absolved of the way that power makes you subject to it. So, I wonder, what does it mean to produce ethical knowledge in the context of an unethical institution?”
— Sarah Law, SFU alum and climate researcher
Can you walk us through some of the central ideas and questions behind your research?
In my thesis, “Futures on FIRE: The Moral Politics of Hard Economic Sensibilities,” I wrote about how people come to understand the moral weight of their economic conduct through a financial self-help movement called Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE). People are worried about fascism all around the world, and we are seeing unprecedented overlapping crises unfolding at the same time. The questions of my thesis were really about, how do people talk about financial independence in this context? How do people come to understand what independence means? And how do people talk about hard work under neoliberalism?
Were there any moments during your research that deeply impacted you?
In my first term, I was in Dr. Coleman Nye’s graduate feminist theory course, and I would go to Nye’s office and be like, “I don’t want to be here.” And then we would have a conversation. I would read something from class, like the work of Indigenous and Black feminist theorists who are already doing this work, whose relationship to the university and the way that the university produces knowledge is really different from mine. And they have found alternative ways to produce knowledge otherwise that I found really inspiring.
You’ve received numerous accolades for your work, including the Dean’s convocation medal, SSHRC Master’s award, the Laurine Harrison Graduate Thesis Award, and the Canadian Sociological Association Graduate Merit Award, among others. What do these honours mean to you?
These awards are the only way I can sustain my life and make my work possible. Grad students need money. So, I am grateful for these awards. But I also think that everybody should get them. Everybody who does this work should not have to worry about their rent and groceries. With that being said, my gratitude for awards like this mainly comes from my gratitude for the people who make it possible for me to do this work. So, my advisors, and also, my friends, my comrades.
I think the real marker of legitimacy for my master’s is that I got to answer the questions that I’ve been asking my whole life. The institutional accolades are good in terms of where it gets me career-wise, I guess, but the way that I want to be legitimized, ultimately, is that my work needs to be meaningful to people who I think really matter.
How do you hold space for both critical rigour and emotional resilience in doing this work?
What this Empire ultimately does emotionally, and this is what I argue in my thesis, is that it makes subjects who desire to become unaffected by crisis, and become cold and void, so that you don’t have to deal. It’s ultimately trying to sever our ability to feel and have empathy.
I’ve cried a lot. I read Audre Lorde and I cry. I read Leanne Simpson and I cry. What we don’t talk about in organizing work is that it’s grieving work. It’s grieving work because we are witnessing the constant ending of so many worlds and the deaths of so many people.
I would say, lean into the feeling, even if it is hard and feels like it’s distracting you from your work. Bring it into the work, because it’s what we need. We cannot produce work that is empty of the writer, especially in moments like this.
How do you personally imagine a just or liberated future?
My vision for a just future — it is both really sad and really wonderful in that it is really simple. And it comes with grief. Ultimately, it is: my loved ones live nearby. There are kids riding their bikes outside. I’m sitting on the porch with my closest friends. We don’t have to worry about our housing. We don’t have to worry about food. We know our neighbours. They know us. The water is clean. The land is governed by people who really care for it and know it. Land is returned. Native species are thriving, and people are happy.
I feel lucky that I have glimpses of those moments when I’m with the people who I love, and that’s how I know that I can remain hopeful, because in those moments, I see it is possible.
If you could give advice to future sociology graduate students or aspiring researchers, what would it be?
The future seems really scary. Nothing is promised. I can’t promise if you do the right things, you’ll get the dream job in academia.
“Nothing is promised or secure except for our love and commitment to worlds otherwise. When everything else seems fraught, turn to the thing that is promised, that is, each other.” — Sarah Law, SFU alum and climate researcher
Find out more about Law’s research, including her thesis, at her website, linktr.ee/sarahlaw.