Metta Spencer

Metta Spencer (born August 29, 1931) is a Canadian sociologist, writer, peace researcher, and activist. She is Professor Emeritus of sociology at the University of Toronto.

Biography After completing a Ph.D. in sociology in 1969 at the University of California, Berkeley, Spencer joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto’s Erindale College in 1971. She taught regularly in the university’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program, which she founded in 1989 and coordinated until her retirement in 1997.

Spencer has specialized in peace and war studies, and has been active in the Canadian peace movement. As the founding president and director of the Canadian Disarmament Information Service (CANDIS), she published the monthly Peace Calendar from 1983 to 1985, when the publication changed to magazine format and took the name Peace Magazine. In 1997, she organized "The Lessons of Yugoslavia," a three-day Science for Peace conference at the University of Toronto. In 2011, she published The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, the culmination of 28 years of research and hundreds of interviews with Russian politicians and activists. She argues that Western peace activists' influence on Russians, including Mikhail Gorbachev, helped end the Cold War more so than pressure from the US or NATO. In her book Two Aspirins and a Comedy: How Television Can Enhance Health and Society (2006), she argues that television could be a force for health and social change.

Awards Confederation Medal awarded by Governor-General for Service to Canada, 1992 Global Citizen Award, United Nations, 1995 United Nations Association in Canada Award, 1999

Books Adolescent Prejudice (Co-author with Charles Y. Glock, Robert Wuthnow, and Jane Piliavin). New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Foundations of Modern Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976. (published in four American and seven Canadian editions) Two Aspirins and a Comedy: How Television Can Enhance Health and Society. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2006. The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Press, 2010.

Books edited Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change, Vol. 13. Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1991. World Security: The New Challenge (Co-editor with Carl G. Jacobsen, Morris Miller, and Eric Tollefson). Pugwash Canada. Toronto: Dundurn, 1994. Women in Post-Communism: Research on Russia and Eastern Europe, Vol. 2 (Co-editor with Barbara Wejnert, with the assistance of Slobodan Drakulic). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1997. Separatism: Democracy and Disintegration. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. The Lessons of Yugoslavia: Research on Russia and Eastern Europe, Vol. 3. Amsterdam, London: JAI Press, Elsevier, 2000.