Futures of Gambling Studies: An International Conference for Early Career Scholars

Megan Bailey holds a PhD in Public Health. Megan is a postdoctoral research fellow currently working at the Australian National University’s Centre for Gambling Research. She has a range of applied qualitative and mixed methods research skills, and experience in program evaluation and implementation science, particularly in the areas of behavioural addiction, health promotion and Indigenous health and wellbeing research.

Paula Jääskeläinen is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Helsinki Research Centre for Addiction, Control, and Governance (CEACG). Her dissertation focuses on the socio-cultural normalization of gambling using a case example of the recently opened urban casino in the city of Tampere (Finland), and online gambling marketing. In her work, she combines perspectives from gambling studies and urban sociology. She has wide-ranging experience of conducting focus group interviews and online interviews in several studies concerning urban segregation, recreational gambling and gambling related social problems. Currently, she is working in a Nordic research project on gambling companies’ social media use.

Marc Lajeunesse is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University. His Research focuses on toxicity in online games. He is driven to understand toxic and transgressive phenomena in order to help create more positive conditions within games with the ultimate hope that we can produce more equitable and joyful play experiences for more people. He has published on the Steam marketplace and DOTA 2, and is a co-author of the upcoming Microstreaming on Twitch (under contract with MIT Press).

Hannah Pitt is a VicHealth Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University. She is a qualitative public health researcher who completed her PhD in 2018, which explored the impact and influence of sports betting advertising on young people’s gambling attitudes and consumption intentions. Her research has focused on exploring the normalisation of gambling in at-risk groups, such as young people, older adults, women, and young men, and understanding the influence of industry tactics on attitudes and behaviours relating to harmful industries. She is also interested in exploring how young people can be better engaged in public health advocacy initiatives that address the harms caused by harmful industries

Steve Sharman is a Research Fellow at King's College London and the first behavioural addictions focused Research Fellow within the National Addiction Centre. He has held previous post-doctoral positions at the University of East London, and the University of Lincoln. Steve completed his PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, and his MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. He is a current recipient of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, and has previously been awarded the King’s Prize Fellowship, and the Society for the Study of Addiction’s Griffith Edwards Academic Fellowship. His research interests include gambling behavior, gambling in virtual reality, and problem gambling in specific vulnerable populations. Steve is a member of The National UK Research Network for Behavioural Addictions (NUK-BA) and is part of the organising committee for the Current Advances in Gambling Research Conference. He also supervises final year undergraduate and post-graduate dissertations and teaches undergraduate and post-graduate psychology.

Andrei Zanescu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada. His doctoral research project focuses on simulation in blockbuster games and cultural stereotyping. Andrei has published platform studies work in New Media and Society and The Journal of Consumer Culture on the hybridization of game platforms and gambling mechanisms as part of the Responsible Gaming project run by Dr. Martin French. He is also a co-author on the forthcoming Microstreaming on Twitch (under contract with MIT Press).

Vincent Wagner has a PhD in Clinical Psychology (University of Nantes, France). Currently, he is an early career researcher at the Institut universitaire sur les dépendances and an adjunct professor in the Addiction Studies and Research Program, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Sherbrooke (Canada). His research works focus on, using mostly qualitative and collaborative designs, trajectories of psychoactive substance use, addictive behaviors, services utilization, change processes and time perspectives, especially among vulnerable populations (e.g., people living in precariousness, seniors, etc.).

Kate Bedford is a Professor of Law and Political Economy at the University of Birmingham (UK). Her research focuses mostly on two areas: i. gender, law, and international development, and ii. the political economy of gambling law and regulation. In 2008, she began using commercial and non-commercial bingo to think in new ways about the regulation of everyday speculation. Her second book, Bingo Capitalism: The Law and Political Economy of Everyday Gambling, was published in 2019. She currently co-edits the Critical Gambling Studies journal. More information about her work is available here: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/law/bedford-kate.aspx

Dr Fiona Nicoll is a Professor in Political Science at the University of Alberta. A transnational scholar and founding editor and current co-editor of Critical Gambling Studies, an international, interdisciplinary, double-blind peer-reviewed journal and blog, Dr Nicoll works together with scholars around the world to shift academic discourses beyond a narrow focus on ‘problem gambling’.  Recent examples include a recent special issue on Critical Indigenous Gambling Studies and a book chapter exploring  gambling, affect and aesthetics in the award-winning television drama, Ozark.

Patrizia Villotti an Assistant Professor with the Department of Education & Pedagogy (career section) at UQAM. She obtained a PhD in Psychological Sciences and Education at the Univesity of Trento in Italy, and held several post-doctoral positions in work psychology and mental health at work in different countries (Italy, Belgium, Australia, Canada). She does research in organizational psychology, work disability prevention and management, and clinical psychology. Among others, she teaches and does research on the topic of burnout

Martin French an Associate Professor with the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University. He has studied gambling and quasi-gambling games, particularly as they have been transformed by processes related to digitalization, as part of his broader research program on risk governmentalities.

Annie-Claude Savard (ACS) is an associate professor in the School of Social Work and Criminology at Laval University. Her current research examines the social representations of individual and collective responsibility in the gambling field, discourses analysis in gambling advertising and prevention messages, gambling among young adults and the medicalization of issues related to gambling.

Jennifer Reynolds (JR) is a knowledge broker for the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) and one of the founding members of RANGES. Trained in public health, JR is an applied researcher with 15+ years experience on the topic of youth gambling prevention and integrated knowledge mobilization, using traditional and arts-based participatory research methods to dissolve barriers and bridge the gap between research and practice.Previously, JR was the lead on developing best practices for youth gambling harm prevention, has produced two documentaries as gambling prevention/education resources, and was an FRQ-SC funded Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University.

Adèle Morvannou is a trained psychologist and is currently a professor in the Community Health Sciences program at the Université de Sherbrooke. She is a frequent researcher at the Institut universitaire sur les dépendances and with the HERMES multidisciplinary research team and an associate researcher at the Charles-Le Moyne Research Center. She is interested in the accessibility of services for women who experience gambling-related harms, poker and video game players and gambling trajectories.

Eva Monson is an early career professor at the Université de Sherbrooke (Canada) and one of the founding members of the RANGES community. Her current research is devoted to investigating how social and environmental deprivation, from the level of the individual to the neighbourhoods where they reside, factor into the dialogue concerning responsible gambling practices.