mathieu.albert@utoronto.ca    

Mathieu’s current research program examines how the changing research policy landscape in Canada has potentially created new boundaries in health research. More specifically, his research explores questions such as: 

• Are interdisciplinary policies in the health research field inadvertently creating new hierarchies among disciplines?

• What is the impact of these policies on knowledge production and what is seen as legitimate science in health?

• What strategies do scientific groups deploy to achieve legitimacy in this new research environment?

Answering these questions is critical, as we need to clarify whether interdisciplinary research policies are holding their promise of creating new, inclusive research environments in health or whether they are surreptitiously producing new hierarchies between scientific groups. 

He published in a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals in social science and in medicine, including articles on symbolic boundaries between scientific groups (in Minerva and Social Science and Medicine), science policy-making processes (Science, Technology & Human Values), academic assessment criteria (Higher Education) and funding agencies (Canadian Journal of Higher Education and Social Science and Medicine). He also co-edited a book with Scott Frickel (Brown University) and Barbara Prainsack (University of Vienna) on interdisciplinarity in 2017 (Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press). 

His current research program’s is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

He was an elected member of the Science, Knowledge and Technology Section Council of the American Sociological Association from 2012 to 2015. In 2011, he received the Sociology of Knowledge and Technology section Best Paper Award for his article titled: “Boundary-Work in the Health Research Field: Biomedical and Clinician Scientists’ Perceptions of Social Science Research” (Minerva, 2009).

Mathieu received is PhD in Sociology from the Université de Montréal in 1999.

Areas of interest and expertise:

• Sociology of science and of the health professions

• Interdisciplinary studies

• Higher education studies

• Social theory

• Epistemology

• Qualitative social analysis