Mike Gismondi was the Director of the Master of Arts in Integrated Studies program from 2001 to 2010 and is currently a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Integrated Studies at Athabasca University–Canada's Open University. He is Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta and a Research Fellow with the Centre for Research in Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CERLAC) at York University, Toronto. He is editor of Aurora: Interviews with Leading Thinkers and Writers, and an editorial board member of the Electronic Journal of Sociology.
Mike earned his PhD in the study of religion and politics with a focus on the Nicaraguan Revolution at the Department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Canada. He has published nationally and internationally, and does theoretical work in Nicaraguan social history, environmental sociology, and the place of the local in a globalizing world. He is working on a new project on the social economy and sustainability.
Mike is currently focusing on two SSHRC funded research projects. He is Steering Committee member and director of the Mapping and Portraiture sub-group of the BC-Alberta Social Economy Research Node (BALTA), as well as a member of the National Social Economy Hub Mapping and Portraiture Committee. With Balta, he is also participating in research into rural sustainability and the social economy, municipal incentives for enabling the social economy, and heritage building conservation and sheltering the social economy.
As well, he is co-investigator with his colleague Deborah Davidson of University of Alberta in a smaller SSHRC funded research project examining key discourses in the debate about the expansion of tars sands exploitation in northern Alberta. For that work Mike is writing about continuities (historic to contemporary) in the visual imaginary of the tars sands, and exploring how people justify exploitation of the tars sands, or defend nature, and how both groups urge steps towards a conversion economy in the face of peak oil.
