Dominique Falls

My name is Dr. Dominique Falls, but I go by Dominique or Dom. I have played some sort of competitive sport since I was very young and in my adult life, I have coached, served on various Boards of Directors, and administered programs with a number of sport bodies. Some of my favourite sport-related memories are coaching the Women's National Team at the Homeless World Cup in Paris (2011), running a half-marathon at midnight on the summer solstice in Inuvik Northwest Territories (2014), and watching former students represent their Nations at the All-Native Basketball Tournament in Prince Rupert (2017 and 2019). Yet, despite the fact that sport and leisure have been places of love, friendship, and growth, they have been places of distrust, violence, and trauma. It is this complex relationship I have with sport and leisure that led me to where I am today. After completing a BSc in Sociology of Law (2007), I received my MA in Human Kinetics (2009) and my PhD in Sociology (2017).

For my MA, I used oral history interviews to understand the experiences of Canadian women who went to the USA on sports scholarships. For my PhD, I did an ethnography of youth sport and parenting cultures in the West Kootenays of British Columbia. I've also been part of some cool research projects that push the taken-for-granted norms of sport. A recent project with colleagues in Sociology at SFU takes a mixed methods approach (e.g., interviews, survey, content analysis) to understand the experiences of girls and non-binary folks who play baseball. Another project used a gender+-based lens to do an environmental scan of existing soccer programming in BC.