Rory Crath, M.A., Ph.D.

Associate Professor | Chair of the Research Sequence
Contact

Office: Lilly Hall 
Phone: 413-585-7958
Email: rcrath@smith.edu
Pronouns: he/him

Rory Crath leans against a railing in the Smith College Campus Center
Education

B.A., McMaster University 
M.A., University of Toronto 
Ph.D., University of Toronto


Selected works in Smith ScholarWorks

Biography

Rory Crath brings a sociological and visual studies imagination, humanities thinking, and years of experience as a community activist and youth worker in Tkaranto (now known as Toronto, Canada) to the following interconnected research questions:

  1. How do forces of colonization, racialized capitalism, and state-direct liberalism shape the contexts in which knowledge about marginalized communities are generated?
  2. And what alternative ways of imagining and practicing social services and health care might arise from centering what is often sidelined: the knowledge paradigms, artistic and political expressions and embodied practices being cultivated in queer/trans/Black/Indigenous and other minoritized life worlds?

Crath's work is interdisciplinary, collaborative, community-driven, and draws upon novel arts-based methodologies in the following areas of research: risk governance; approaches to queer sexualities, embodiments and health and the biopolitics of health technologies.

Selected Publications

Rangel, JC; Crath, R; Renade, S. (2022). A breach in the social contract: Limited participation and limited evidence in COVID-19 responses. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. First published: 03 October 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.13775

Crath, R; Dixon, J; and Warner, J (editors and author). Risk at the Boundaries of Social Work: An Editorial. Health Risk and Society. 

Crath, Rory; Rangel, Cristian & Gaubinger, Adam. Biopolitics' Newest Iteration: Gay men, PrEP and the pharmaco-pornographic imagination. Sexualities. Published On-line: Dec 01, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607211056882

Rangel, J. Cristian & Crath, Rory. (2021). Managing risk, managing affects: The emerging biopolitics of HIV neutrality, Health, Risk & Society. DOI: 10.1080/13698575.2021.1972088

Crath, Rory., Karpman, Hannah.,Mull, J.J., Francis, Leigh-Anne. (2021). Theorizing Black trans survivance and care in the context of Covid 19: A Clinical case study. Smith College Studies in Social Work Journal, 91(1), 55-74. https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2020.1867030

Crath, Rory. & Rangel, Cristian. (2020). Engaging cultural humility diffractively. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. Special Issue: Cultural Humility and Contemporary Medical Practice: (How) Can the Humanities Help? https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.13409

Crath, Rory (2020). Animating objectivity: The Chicago Settlement’s use of numeric and aesthetic knowledges to render its immigrant neighbours and neigbourhood knowable. In. J. Gal, S. Köngeter, S. Vicary (eds). The history of Settlement Houses. Bristol, UK: Polity Press.

Rory Crath, Adam Gaubinger & Cristian Rangel (2019) Studying the “sexuality-health-technology nexus”: a new materialist visual methodology, Culture, Health & Sexuality, DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2018.1558456

Park, Y.; Crath, R., and Jefferey, D. (2018). Disciplining the risky subject: a discourse analysis of the concept of resilience in social work literature. Journal of Social Work. First Published September 4, 2018.

Crath, Rory (2017), 'Off the Wall': Reading Community mural making as a contestable site of youth governance. Journal of Youth Studies. Published online June 13, 2017.

Crath, Rory & Rangel, Cristian (2017). Paradoxes of an assimilation politics: media production of gay male belonging in the Canadian ‘vital public’ from the tainted blood scandal to the present. Culture, Health and Sexuality. Published on line January 03, 2017.

Crath, Rory (2017). Governing young people as an aesthetic and spatial practice. Urban Studies. 54(5), pp. 1263–1279

Crath, Rory (2016). Monstrosities and Moral Publics. Mobilizing Aesthetic Knowledges in the Service of Urban Governance. Cultural Studies, 30(2), 261-288.

Trevelyan, C., Crath, R., Chambon, A. (2014). Promoting Critical Reflexivity through Arts-Based Media: A Case Study. British Journal of Social Work, 44(1), 7-26.

Crath, R (2012). Belonging as a Mode of Interpretive In-between: Image, Place and Space in the Video Works of Racialised and Homeless Youth. British Journal of Social Work, 42(1), 42-57.