June 14, 2010
Media contact: Anne Russell
Cell: 604-798-3709
Office: 604-795-2826
anne.russell@ufv.ca
Study of deviance leads to academic gold medal for Williams
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| Kim Williams really enjoyed the cohort-based style of the UFV MA in Crim program. "I was learning with a group of other professionals who brought their own varied and practical experience to the material.” |
What do prostitution, midwifery, and youth crime have in common?
All three activities have at times been considered extremely deviant criminal behaviour and at others been tolerated or even accepted, depending on the social values of the times and the government in power.
Kim Williams, an MA in Criminal Justice student at the University of the Fraser Valley, turned her interest in social interpretations of deviance into a thesis for her master’s program. For her efforts, and her near-perfect grade point average, she is this year’s winner of the Governor General’s academic gold medal winner at UFV. Williams earned a cumulative grade point average of 4.17, which stands about halfway between an A and an A+ average. The gold medal goes to the student with the highest GPA in a master’s-level program.
Williams is a familiar face in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UFV. Her day job as career development coordinator puts her in touch with virtually every crim student, as she facilitates hundreds of practicum placements per year and maintains contact with more than 150 criminal justice-related agencies.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in criminology from Simon Fraser University in the 1990s, and spent a few years working with at-risk youth for the City of Surrey before joining UFV.
“I entered UFV’s master’s program partly out of personal interest, and partly to show that I was committed to continuing my education,” she notes. “It was also a way of tying up loose ends academically.”
This wasn’t Williams’ first time in a master’s program, you see. She entered the SFU MA program shortly after graduating with her bachelor’s degree.
“I found myself suffering from a passionate need to connect with the practical world after spending many years with my head in the books and within the confines of academia,” she said. A bit of travel in Southeast Asia and her time working with street youth, not to mention a few gigs as a stand-up comedian, proved the perfect antidote to too much academic theory.
Even the comedy was applicable to her career.
“Humour is a great tool to deflect conflict, work with difficult people, and relate to them in an unconventional way and help them to open up,” she says.
After working at UFV for a few years and watching students work their way through the MA in Criminal Justice program, she decided that the time was right to return to her studies.
“I really enjoyed the cohort-based style of the UFV program, in which we all went through as a group, doing our courses on weekends. I was learning with a group of other professionals who brought their own varied and practical experience to the material.”
Williams knew that she wanted to focus on how a society’s definitions of deviance can change over time, depending on the government in power and the legislation it chooses to implement.
“I was really interested in how the pendulum swings to meet the needs of the current government, and how definitions change, and then comes out as policy and practice that needs to be implemented by those within the system whose boots are on the ground on a daily basis.”
For instance, 15 years ago, midwifery was illegal in British Columbia and midwives who attended home births were risking arrest, especially if something went wrong with the process. Now they have the opportunity to be licensed and are allowed to attend hospital births as well as home births.
Prostitution has at times been heavily prosecuted, and at other times generally tolerated. There was even a proposal to operate sanctioned cooperative brothels during the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
Williams enjoyed her master’s-level studies, but she’s relieved to be done. It was a tough slog, balancing a fulltime job, life as a newlywed (she married a few weeks before starting her MA), and graduate studies.
“I had to be very strict about prioritizing and respecting deadlines,” she recalls. “I viewed myself as a regular student and didn’t try to leverage the fact that I worked in the department for preferential treatment. In fact, being evaluated by my peers put pressure on me to submit outstanding work. I went in with a very clear focus and tried to make every course I took result in the completion of a chapter of my thesis.”
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| Kim Williams receives her award from VP Academic Eric Davis. |
She credits husband Shayne and her parents Rod and Elaine Nickel for support, the criminal justice faculty members (particularly her supervisors Martin Silverstein and Irwin Cohen) for guidance, and the librarians of UFV for helping her with her research.
“I really have to commend them for helping me find difficult, hard-to-source, research material. They are an often-overlooked blessing for students.”
A graduate of North Delta Secondary, Williams lives in New Westminster. She dedicated her thesis to her late grandmother Simone Morrissette, a strong woman who served as an inspiration for Williams.
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