Liesl Gambold

Cross appointment

• Gender and Women's Studies

Education

• BA, University of Illinois
• MA, PhD, University of California Los Angeles

Research interests

Liesl Gambold is an anthropologist whose earlier work in Russia focused on economic and social responses to political and market restructuring, gender relations in rural communities, and the struggle between individual and group ideologies. She studied the structures in Russian village life that were salient to local residents, who were not fundamentally resistant towards the changing power structures of their rural agricultural sectors, but were less inclined to decollectivize the social nature of their village. This led to further research on the emotional ties of collective work and property as they relate to two areas: reason and emotion in socialist culture; and anthropological and economic accounts of the moral economy and governance of the commons.

Dr. Gambold’s current anthropological research is on aging, mobility, housing, and international retirement migration. As baby boomers enter retirement age, shifts in their demographics and lifestyle choices are increasingly salient in policy-making and academic discussions. Dr. Gambold has conducted research in Mexico among Canadians and Americans who have permanently migrated south, in southern France and Spain, which have been popular European retirement destinations for decades, in Sweden and Germany, where she interviewed residents at LGBT aging and housing facilities, and in Brussels where she interviewed European Union officials about EU pensioner, migration and health policies. Dr. Gambold has been part of many interdisciplinary research projects acting as a primary qualitative researcher. She is a research associate at Dalhousie’s Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence and has been the Coordinator of the Gender & Women’s Studies Program since 2018.

Selected publications

• 2021 Redden, M., Gahagan, J., Kia, H., Humble, A. H., Stinchcombe, A., Manning, E., Ecker, J., de Vries, B., Gambold, L. Oliver, B., & Thomas, R. Housing as a determinant of health for older LGBT Canadians: Focus group findings from a national housing study, Housing and Society, DOI: 10.1080/08882746.2021.1905996
• 2020 Wranik, W.D., Gambold, L., & Peacock, S. “Uncertainty tolerance among experts involved in drug reimbursement recommendations: Qualitative evidence from HTA committees in Canada and Europe”, Health Policy. https://europepmc.org/article/med/33388158
• 2018a  Wranik, W.D., Zielinska, D.A., Gambold, L., & Sevgur, S. “Threats to the value of health technology assessment: Qualitative evidence from Canada and Poland. Health Policy. doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2018.12.001
• 2018b  “DIY Aging: Retirement migration as a new age-inscription”, Anthropology & Aging Quarterly, 39(1), 82-93.
• 2017  “’Maybe you will remember’: Interpretation and life course reflexivity”, AREA, 49(4), 402-408. doi: 10.1111/area.12344
• 2013 “Retirement Abroad as a Women’s Aging Strategy”, Anthropology & Aging Quarterly, 34(2), 184-198.