Kayla Preston

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. My areas of interest include extremism, political and gender-based violence, qualitative methodology, and race and colonization. I have done research on far-right extremism in Canada and the mainstreaming of far-right in Canada and the United States. I am a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Joseph Bombardier Scholar. In my spare time, I love to hike with my Labrador Retriever!

 I have independently taught five courses at the University of Toronto across the field of sociology, Introduction to Sociology- Social Inquiries, Social Movements (I have taught this course twice), Social Inequality, and Race and Ethnicity in Canada. All my courses are concerned with teaching students critical thinking, questioning power structures and are student driven. 

 For the past three years, I have assisted in teaching core research methods modules including introduction of qualitative analysis and intermediate qualitative analysis at the University of Toronto. For these research methods modules, I led skills-based tutorials that teach students across methodological backgrounds how to conduct discourse analysis, thematic analysis, participant observation, ethnography, interviews, transcribe, code and analyse data.  Additionally, I have held 22 teaching assistant positions in courses such as political sociology, crime and deviance, gender, and a range of research methods.