A missing person’s case has come to a tragic end.
Today, the body of UBC sociology professor Sinikka Elliott was found on Salt Spring Island, according to an RCMP statement.
She had been missing since May 12.
More than 100 volunteers assisted in the search.
“Although a full determination has yet to be made, RCMP do not believe that criminality was involved in the woman’s sudden death,” the Salt Spring Island RCMP said.
The head of the UBC department of sociology, Guy Stecklov, issued a statement expressing sadness on behalf of his colleagues.
Elliott joined the department in 2017 as an assistant professor before becoming an associate professor in 2019.
“As department head, I have had the honour of working with Sinikka and have gained, as have so many others, from her unwavering passion for both understanding and addressing longstanding systematic inequalities pervading society,” Stecklov. “Her early scholarship focused on how families navigate discussions around children’s sexuality and showed how gender, race, class and age intersect in parental approaches to managing adolescent sexuality. Recently, she worked with a group of collaborators to examine how families in the US and Canada, including low-income households, manage the complex task of providing food for their families.
“This work revealed the complex challenges families face trying to meet heightened nutritional goals; from picky eaters at the dinner table to the stark inequalities that limit the ability of many households to put healthy food on the table,” he added.
According to Stecklov, Elliott “was an exceptionally skilled and deeply engaged scholar with a deep-felt commitment to social justice and equality for all”.
