Bill O'Grady, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology here at the University of Guelph.
Well, my undergraduate
degree was at Carleton University in
Ottawa and I also did my Masters at
Carleton and from there, I did a
pre-doctoral placement at Memorial
University at the Institute for Social
and Economic Research and following two
years in St. John's, I started my Ph.D. at the
University of Toronto. My Ph.D. thesis looked at youth
unemployment in rural Newfoundland. So, I interviewed a group of young people from
the Northern Peninsula which one of the more remote areas of the province and they were
all, at the time, unemployed. A lot of them do seasonal work, so they were fishing - the guys -
they were fishing in the summer but in the winter months, they were out of work and so I
compared some of their their stories
with some other youth in similar areas
who did have work, to try to  compare to the kids were employed with the kids that were
unemployed.
Well, I generally found that these are a
pretty resilient group of young people. A
lot of them also leave the province for work. They were heading to places like Fort
McMurray, other places in Alberta, and they would sort of come and go, depending upon
the season and the
demand for their labour. So, a lot of them 
didn't hang around and a lot of them, you know,
were fairly skilled at what they did
but they also felt that they needed to
leave their home province in order to get employment. One of the things about it is that it's
not new, I mean if you look at the history of Newfoundland, many Newfoundlanders have been
doing this for generations. A lot of Newfoundlanders were actually in New York City
building skyscrapers back in the early
1900s. So, this is something
that really has been part of their
history and culture for generations. I
began by looking at - my general interest
is marginalized youth - so again looking
at unemployed youth in Newfoundland, they're a group that are fairly marginalized,
at least from the economy and then coming to the U of T
and being in Ontario in the late 1990s was a time when there were a lot
of so-called "squeegee kids" on the streets
of Toronto. So, I was interested in
interviewing and talking to these youth
because they were generating a lot of
attention
in the press at the time, a lot of politicians were, you know, trying to get rid of them and
they eventually passed legislation, the "Safe Streets Act" in 2000 where they outlawed or banned squeegee
cleaning on the streets. So, I've been
looking at that kind of street culture
and street life for the past 15 years or
so. In many respects, kids who have
tough times and kids who don't - they're not all that different, I mean young people are
young people but a lot of times it's the
reaction that people have towards these young
people that I think is is the big thing
so I'm really interested in trying to, in
some respects, set the record straight so
that these young people aren't reacted to in
ways that they don't deserve. A lot
of the work I do is both qualitative and
quantitative so not only do I give them
surveys to fill in, and et cetera, but I also
interview and talk to them and ask them
about their life histories, about their
future goals or aspirations and I find
that's a really useful technique, having the
quantitative as well as the qualitative. Yeah, most of our research recruits young people who are
using services for homeless youth, either
in drop-ins or shelters. Homeless Hub, yeah
the Homeless Hub is a part of the Canadian Observatory of Homelessness.
The Homeless Hub is basically a website that's got, from what I understand, the largest library of
research on homelessness in the world.
We've got , I think, access to
30,000 documents on the site right now.
That's a really comprehensive site that
really has got a lot of hits over the
last few years and so I'm a member of
that group. We're just currently
involved in a fairly large study.
We're going to be interviewing youth
all across Canada, all 10 provinces and
at least one territory, I think. We're working with service providers
and academics from across the country who
have who have an interest in this area
and we're trying to do a comparative study of youth homelessness in Western Canada,
Central Canada, and then Eastern Canada. We've got an
undergraduate and a graduate program. The
undergraduate one is Criminal Justice and Public Policy and the graduate one is
Criminology and Criminal Justice Policy
and the undergraduate grouping, I'm not
sure how many students are in that program, hundreds I hear, and the graduate program
we've got about 15 coming every year and we work with these students through a wide
range of activities and research in
homelessness to some extent, some people
look at corporate crime, other students
are interested in violence against women.
So it's a really broad range of
activities that students can do research in.
I think for the undergraduates
coming in first year, I think their
understanding of crime and criminology, I
would argue, is largely based on what
they see in the mass media, perhaps what
they might read in the newspapers, social
media, and I think what our job is, is that
sort of we provide a corrective of that.
The reality of crime, the reality of
social control is not necessarily what
they've been exposed to prior to
entering university. So, I think that is
sometimes a bit of a shock to young
people and they're much more, I think,
they're critical of what they actually
see in the media. That's one of the value
added aspects of the degree is that
these young people now have a
critical eye that I think many did not have before they started the
program.
One of the interesting things about Guelph is that you take courses in different areas,
especially in first year, and I don't
think necessarily you have to pick
something in first year. A lot of
students do but sometimes you might be
taking courses in first year just
out of interest and you might really gravitate
towards the areas that, in the past,
you haven't thought much about.
So, rather than having a preset idea of what you want to do at Guelph necessarily, I think sometimes that first
year is a way to explore areas that you
may not be explored as a high school
student
and sometimes that can regenerate an
interest that you might pursue and get a
degree in that program. Sometimes what
you think you're going to study in university
and what you end up doing are sometimes not the exact same thing.
