About Jessica Stallone

I am a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto and an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. I study the everyday politics of race and immigration in Québec, with a focus on identity, belonging, and intersectional inequalities. I am particularly interested in aging and later life as sites of political formation and national belonging. My work bridges insights from key fields, including immigration, race, and ethnicity, political sociology, aging and the life course, gender, and urban sociology.

My dissertation, Growing Old with the Nation: Aging, Belonging, and the Politics of Exclusion, is an ethnographic study of how nationalism functions as an emotional resource and political tool for white Francophone Catholic seniors in Québec. Drawing on 400 hours of fieldwork in old-age homes and community spaces, 26 life- history interviews with seniors and their adult kin, and 9 focus groups (N = 42), I introduce the concept of “aging in nationhood” to show how later life becomes a fertile site for the reproduction of exclusionary politics. Everyday cultural practices—choirs, festivals, and social activities—serve as affective anchors offering purpose and dignity at a life stage often marked by isolation and declining mobility, while simultaneously reinforcing racialized and colonial boundaries of belonging. This research shows how nationalist affect is lived through ordinary social life amid the precarity of aging, and how political values are intergenerationally transmitted and evolve within families.

My research has been published in The British Journal of Sociology, Gender & Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. I have also published book reviews in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and International Migration Review. My work has received several awards and fellowships from the Fonds de recherche du Québec —Société et Culture (FRQSC), Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA), the American Sociological Association (ASA), the Munk School of Global Affairs, and the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto.

Beyond my research, I have taught both introductory and advanced undergraduate courses, including Intermediate Introduction to Qualitative Methods in Sociology (SOC204), Intermediate Qualitative Methods (SOC254), Race, Class, Gender (SOC367), and Special Topics: Nation-Making in the West (SOC495) at the University of Toronto, and an Integrative Research Seminar at Dawson College (300-DW) in Montreal, Québec. My teaching praxis is informed by teaching often taken-for-granted core skills in reading and writing, and de- mystifying the hidden curriculum—values I care deeply about as a first-generation scholar.

I was born and raised in Montreal, part of the Italian community that migrated and settled in Québec after the second world war. I am a trilingual scholar in English, French, and Italian, who prioritizes community research in these linguistic settings.