Sarah Clancy
Assistant Professor, Health, Aging & Society

Dr. Sarah Clancy is an Assistant (Teaching) Professor in the Department of Health, Aging, and Society and the Social Psychology Program. Sarah is an award-winning educator who received the MSU Excellence in Teaching Award (Faculty of Social Sciences) in April 2022. Sarah completed her PhD in Sociology at McMaster University, studying the impact of pop culture and dress styles on the development of children’s identity. Her interests in children are reflected in a course she has developed, titled Small Worlds: Children and Childhood (SOC PSY 3ZZ3). Sarah also currently teaches, instructs and supervises the original research projects that Social Psychology students complete in their final year in the program (SOC PSY 4ZZ6), teaches courses in the Department of Health, Aging and Society on health & society (HLTH AGE 1AA3), developed and teaches a course on health and incarceration (HLTH AGE 3T03), as well as supervises fourth year Health, Aging and Society and PNB students completing their independent thesis in their final year of study. Sarah is also the Faculty Advisor for the McMaster Undergraduate Journal of Social Psychology and the Faculty Advisor/Supervisor for the Social Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference.

Sarah has a keen interest in teaching and learning pedagogies, as well as fostering opportunities for student research, engagement, and skill building. Sarah was the Principal Investigator for the 2021-2022 project, "Student Engagement, Success, and Research Inquiry: Creating a Safe and Inclusive Conference Research Space for Social Psychology Undergraduate Students through Student Partnerships." This project was funded by a MacPherson Institute Teaching & Learning PALAT (Priority Areas for Teaching and Learning) Research Grant which supported the first-annual student-run Social Psychology conference in January 2022, along with a pre-conference workshop, and exit feedback survey to evaluate the conference. Sarah worked with former social psychology graduate, Shaina McDonald (M.A.Ed. at the University of Ottawa), co-investigator/RA, as well as fourth-year undergraduate students, Claudia Meneguzzi and Raisa Jadavji. In 2023, Sarah supervised four exceptional students in the Social Psychology Program who developed and organized the conference as direct research experience in the course, SOC PSY 3K03: Research Experience. Alison Rogers, Monserrat Ramirez Ruvalcaba, Shaza Zahir Hassan and Sophia Cupello were supported by the original research team members, Claudia Meneguzzi, Raisa Jadavji, and Shaina McDonald. The conference was held in March 2023.

Sarah seeks to offer a range of research and learning opportunities for both current and former students. In the 2021-2022 academic year, Sarah developed and launched a new initiative, a core skill-building non-credit certificate of completion workshop series, called the ‘ABC’s Skills Workshop and Certificate of Completion’. The ‘ABC’s’ refer to the following: A - Academic writing and article reading; B - Building communication and collaboration skills in groups; and, C – Critical thinking skills. Two workshops were held in 2021 and 2022, with a third session in April 2023. On this project, Sarah continues to work with two former students, Jessica Farshait and Mikayla Voets, as facilitators/moderators.

Sarah's other research and teaching interests include: health and health care; social deviance, social problems and criminology; social psychology of crime; health, aging and well-being; health inequalities; health and incarceration; and, historical conceptions of aging. Sarah has taught numerous courses over the years in these subject areas. Additionally, Sarah is a trained qualitative and quantitative researcher.