KIERAN BONNER
PRINCIPAL C0-INVESTIGATOR

Dr. Kieran Bonner is Professor of Sociology, Chair of Sociology and Legal Studies and Director of the Human Sciences Initiative at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. He has extensive experience in interdisciplinary research and teaching as co-founder and editor of Dianoia: A Liberal Arts Interdisciplinary Journal, and founder and Director of the Human Sciences program. His experience as co-investigator on the Culture of Cities: Montreal Toronto Berlin Dublin SSHRC project and as Chair of its Executive Committee from 2000–2005, prepares him well for working with large interdisciplinary research teams. He was a co-investigator on City Life and Well-Being: the Grey Zone of Health and Illness.

He was Academic Dean and Vice President of St. Jerome’s from 1999 – 2005, a Visiting Fellow in the Humanities at Galway University in Ireland in ’93-94 and a Visiting Hannah Arendt Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Humanities and Politics at Bard College in 2011. He has published internationally in Human Studies; History of the Human Sciences; Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics; Compaso: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology and in Canada in The Canadian Review of Sociology; The Canadian Journal of Urban Research; The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies; and with McGill Queen’s University Press.

He is author of A Great Place to Raise Kids: Interpretation Science and the Urban Rural Debate (McGill-Queen’s) and of Power and Parenting: A Hermeneutic of the Human Condition (Macmillan/St. Martins) both of which are publications of research accomplished from a phenomenological hermeneutic perspective. He is also author of various articles on theory (Socratic social theory, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, analysis), on methodology (dialectic, reflexivity, radical interpretive methodology, ethnomethodology), and on issues as wide as the grey zone of health and illness, alcohol consumption, the culture of Dublin, Montreal and Toronto, interdisciplinary dialogue, and student motivation.