Bailey Gerrits

Bailey is pursuing a PhD in political studies at Queen's University, where she is investigating recent news coverage of domestic violence in Canada, examining how news discourses are produced in four Ontario cities: Thunder Bay, Kingston, Ottawa, and Toronto.

Bailey holds a bachelor of arts (honours) and a master of arts in political science from the University of Alberta. She received the Duncan Alexander MacGibbon Medal in Political Science for academic excellence during her undergraduate degree. Bailey has researched how women and men politicians in Canada are covered differently in the news (gendered mediation). Bailey has also researched activism, gender-based violence, and anti-violence awareness campaigns.

Bailey volunteers for various organizations that focus on ending sexualized violence and other human rights violations. She was also involved in community-based research projects that investigate how to better prevent sexual violence among youth and on university campuses, and more recently, she was involved in planning a conference that focused on sexual violence prevention in post-secondary contexts. Combining her academic passion for media analysis with her community leadership in the field of gender-based violence has profoundly shaped Bailey's vision of violence prevention initiatives and human rights discourses; it is this passion that largely motivates her doctoral research.