Aftermath of the Bedford Decision
Conducted by Chris Bruckert
On May 5, 2008 Amy Lebovitch, Valerie Scott and Terri-Jean Bedford launched a Charter Challenge in Ontario. The three sex workers asserted that a number of Criminal Code (CC) provisions restricting prostitution (sections 213(1)(c), s. 210, and s. 212(1)(j) violated their right to life, liberty and security of the person, guaranteed under section seven of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On December 20, 2013 the highest court in the land upheld the ruling by Justice Himel of the Ontario Superior Court declaring the laws unconstitutional because they “prevent[ed] people engaged in a risky - but legal - activity from taking steps to protect themselves from the risks” (Canada v Bedford 2013 at Introduction). This project by Professor Chris Bruckert explores the aftermath of the Bedford decision.
Big Data Surveillance
Conducted by Valerie Steeves
The Big Data Surveillance project is a SSHRC-funded partnership that examines the relationship between big data and surveillance in three linked streams: security, marketing, and governance. Professor Valerie Steeves, together with Kevin Haggerty, is leading the stream on governance. This part of the project examines the use of big data analytics in policing, schools and health care, with a special emphasis on how big data extends the scope of surveillance by co-opting individuals into participating in the surveillance of their own private lives. A graduate scholarship at the PhD level (starting January or September 2017) is available to work on a project on “Big Data Surveillance” under the supervision of Valerie Steeves.
Ces morts qui ne comptent pas : autopsie sociale et politique des corps non-réclamés
Conducted by Isabelle Perreault and Dahlia Namian
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Collateral Consequences to Parents and Families of Young People who Sexually Offend
Conducted by Christine Gervais and Elisa Romano (School of Psychology)
Christine Gervais (Associate Professor of Criminology) and Elisa Romano (School of Psychology) are working together to explore the challenges that parents of sexually offending youth face as they negotiate the best interest of their child, while at the same time attempting to manage the best interest of the children harmed, and of other affected children (including the offending child’s siblings, cousins, neighbours, and friends). The overarching goal of this study is to better understand the impact that a young person’s sexual offending behaviour has on his or her family members, especially on the parents. Particular emphasis is placed on the silencing and stigmatizing effects, as well as on the institutional impediments that families encounter as they navigate the criminal justice, health care, social work and education systems. Data is being collected through qualitative interviews with parents in Eastern Ontario. The study has been sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory on the Rights of the Child and The Law Foundation of Ontario. Undergraduate students interested in becoming involved in this study can do so through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). Graduates students can also undertake M.A. or Ph.D. level research in this area under Professor Gervais’ supervision.
Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory on the Rights of the Child
Community-based social reintegration of First Nations in Québec: Experiences and perspectives of Indigenous people
Conducted by Bastien Quirion
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Community sanctions
Conducted by Françoise Vanhamme
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Cultural and visual criminology
Conducted by Françoise Vanhamme
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Disaster Prisons Partnership
Conducted by Justin Piché
We live in an age of profound disruptions to everyday life such as those associated with climate change (e.g. heat waves, droughts, floods, forest fires, etc.) and health crises (e.g. COVID-19, drug toxicity, etc.). When such disasters occur, they have important ramifications for imprisoned people who are frequently subject to harsher conditions of confinement in the name of emergency management while deprived of assistance and care afforded to those outside prison walls, often with deadly consequences. Formed in 2025, the DPP | Disaster Prisons Partnership led by Professor Justin Piché brings together researchers, criminalized people, their loved ones, community advocates, practitioners, and artists to engage in research and knowledge mobilization that makes visible the challenges faced by imprisoned people to adapt, survive, and exit prisons in the face of disasters to inform public policy and practice in Canada. The DPP features four working groups, including: Prison Art and Writing (PAW); Disaster Prisons Observatory (DPO); Prison Oversight, Accountability and Support (POAS); and Diversion, Decarceration and Community Re-entry (DDCR).
Drugs: Current Issues and New Reflections
Conducted by Line Beauchesne
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Emoting Technologies: Understanding the Regulation of Affect
Conducted by Shoshana Magnet (Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies)
New computer-based affective technologies marketed to express, to regulate and to manipulate human emotions continue to increase in availability. From biometric emotion recognition surveillance cameras alleged to fight terrorism and to keep us safer by recognizing persons evidencing dangerous emotions such as rage, revenge and fear, to video games designed to allow players to experience depression for the purposes of developing empathy to consumer strategies designed to increase marketing share by engaging the potential consumers’ emotional responses to the marketed commodity, new information and communication technologies are heavily reliant on the attempt to understand contemporary “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1977). Brave new possibilities are imagined for these technologies, from the protection of our national security to the improvement of our emotional intelligence and collective psychological welfare. Consistent with the SSHRC goal of examining the roles that “emerging and/or disruptive information and communication technologies play in learning for individuals, institutions and society,” Professor Shoshana Magnet’s project will examine the implications of new technologies aimed at automating emotions. Grounding my project within a current cultural context that remains preoccupied with finding technologies that help us manage our emotions, and interrogating the relationship between these technologies and systemic markers of inequality, my project will investigate three institutional contexts. These include:
- Surveillance: one of the first uses of biometric technologies claimed to be able to identify persons who are security risks by recognizing negative emotion states
- Marketing: the expansion of technologies that can read consumer’s emotional responses in order to improve sales and
- Education: the pedagogical use of children’s literature and video games to teach affective states through an investigation of the development of “empathy games” and “empathy literature” aimed at teaching people how to navigate traumatic emotional experiences.
Although the real-world deployment of technologies aimed at analyzing emotions is often described as being transparent and self-evident, I argue that their uses remain complex, ambiguous, differentially imposed and targeted to specific audiences and, as a result, inherently problematic. As SSHRC highlights, these technologies are being developed “at breakneck speed. In order to benefit from, integrate and adapt to these technologies effectively, we need to understand their ethical, environmental, economic, legal and social implications.” The central problematic of my project is an examination of the implications of these new emotive technologies, the specific focus in this project is the differential implications these technologies have for communities marked by gender, race, sexuality, class and disability. What are the implications for a surveillance society of biometric emotion technologies that are coded in order to identify anger and aggression in order to predict criminal behaviour? What are the costs, both financial and social, of keeping us safer? Looking at the possibilities of these technologies aimed at automating emotions for providing us with new and richer understandings of our emotional worlds as well as the ways in which these technologies may serve to intensify existing inequalities, I aim to think about the social consequences of our longing for new technologies that are skilled at deciphering the complex world of our emotions.
Escape Rooms and Prison Tourism: A Study of Cultures of Penality and Carceral Retasking
Conducted by Kevin Walby, Justin Piché and Linda Mussell
Escape room games, which have grown in popularity across the world, have been described as an educational tool, immersive entertainment experience, and family and team-building activity. Thousands of escape rooms have been established across the world in the past decade alone, with a number of these sites erected in decommissioned sites of confinement. While the notion of escape itself has been explored in prison tourism and criminological scholarship, little research has examined the cultural meanings communicated in escape rooms located in defunct carceral sites and faux-prisons, as well as their broader ramifications. Drawing on insights from political science, criminology, and sociology, this study conducted by Kevin Walby (University of Winnipeg), Justin Piché, and Linda Mussell (University of Canterbury/University of Ottawa) explores the role prison-themed escape rooms play in socio-economic restructuring and how they contribute to meaning making vis-à-vis imprisonment and punishment in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
Explaining Stability in Punishment
Conducted by Cheryl Webster
Cheryl Webster is interested in Canadian imprisonment policy. In collaboration with Anthony Doob (Centre of Criminology and Legal Studies, University of Toronto) their broad research program has been focused on describing and understanding the use of imprisonment in Canada over the past 50 years. Initial work adopted an inter-national comparative approach in an attempt to explain the anomalous nature of trends in Canadian incarceration rates since 1960 as contrasted with those of the U.S. and England/Wales. While they demonstrate that Canada has not been immune to pressure for harsher criminal justice practices and policies, it has largely been able to counter or balance these trends with other moderating forces. More recent work has adopted an intra-national approach in an attempt to describe and understand trends in imprisonment rates within the country. They have found that the various contributors to our rates of imprisonment show not only considerable diverging patterns but also significant variability across place and time. Further, these various stages in the criminal justice process are shown to have differential effects, depending on the characteristics of the offender or the offence. It is precisely the juxtaposition of this description of Canada’s penal landscape as one of considerable internal instability with that from their prior research of overall or aggregate stability which is their current object of study. Specifically, they have been attempting to go beyond a mere description of the various diverging trends in punishment and explain how they – in combination with each other – produce overall stability through various compensatory systems.
Gender-Based Criminalization and Discrimination against Women in Religious Institutions
Conducted by Christine Gervais
Christine Gervais’s research explores gender-based criminalization and discrimination against women in religious institutions, especially in the Roman Catholic Church. She employs participant-inclusive qualitative methods involving interviews and field research with current and former Catholic sisters/nuns in the province of Ontario in order to shed light on the Canonical criminalization of women’s ordination and the gendered exclusion of women religious and lay women by the male hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Professor Gervais also examines the patriarchal constructions of the “deviant nun”, sisters’ resourcefulness and resistance against patriarchal control, as well as sisters’ progressive roles at the forefront of feminist and social justice activism, and among imprisoned and victimized populations. Undergraduate students interested in becoming involved in this study can do so through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). Graduates students can also undertake M.A. or Ph.D. level research in this area under Professor Gervais’ supervision.
Harnessing Evidence for Smarter Crime Control in Latin America, China and USA
Conducted by Irvin Waller
Irvin Waller is engaged actively across the world on ways to invest in evidence based prevention as an alternative to overuse of reactive police and prison policies that are costly to human rights and taxpayers. The research focuses on the application of the conclusions from his books Less Law, More Order, Smarter Crime Control and Rights for Victims of Crime, which are available in Spanish and Chinese. In Latin America, the two day tribute in 2016 to this work organized by the research institute (INACIPE) of the government of Mexico is expected to generate consolidation of this work. He is working with universities in Beijing and Chongqing. He participates in activities of the World Health Organization, UN-Habitat and UNODC, including efforts to invest in achieving the violence prevention targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (3, 5, 11, 16 and 17). From time to time, these lead to research assistantships, particularly for graduate students with advanced knowledge and Spanish.
Historical Sociology of Suicide in Quebec, 1763-2000
Conducted by Patrice Corriveau
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Homelessness and Time: On (Not-)Doing
Conducted by Prashan Ranasinghe
Prashan Ranasinghe has recently completed an ethnography about the way an emergency shelter is ordered on a daily basis and what this ordering means to the deployment of care. Based on this research, I have also completed a book manuscript provisionally titled Helter-Shelter. My next project is indebted to, and draws upon, this previous work. In it, also involving ethnography, I plan to spatialize the time of homelessness by theorizing the dialecticism of doing and not-doing that concurrently constitutes the condition of homelessness.
If Dance Could Help: Experience and Project Sharing`
Conducted by Sylvie Frigon
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Inequalities in adolescent mental health between boys and girls in Canada
Conducted by Val Steeves
Val Steeves is involved in this research project with William Pickett from Brock University. The project includes intersectional qualitative work on the mental health of young people sitting at a variety of social locations. The team is also involved in youth-led participatory action research and in community outreach.
Integration through education and education through integration: Research and training in inclusive pedagogy in Francophone correctional environments
Conducted by Alexis H Truong and Sandra Lehalle
To learn more about this project, please consult the French page.
Intuition and Public Support for Harsh Criminal Justice Policy
Conducted by Carolyn Côté-Lussier
Increasingly punitive political responses toward crime is suggested by growing prison populations in the U.S. and the UK, and the introduction of harsh penal policies in Canada (e.g., increasing minimum sentences). Yet, the public tends to believe that the courts are not 'harsh' enough in dealing with criminals and that sentences are 'too lenient'. Such public attitudes contribute to the implementation of increasingly harsh criminal justice policies that are socially damaging and economically costly. Punitive attitudes are understood as being reflective of cognitive ‘shortcuts’ or assumptions (e.g., underestimating actual sentencing trends, overestimating crime rates). Still, little is known about intuitive or very rapidly formulated punitive attitudes. Professor Carolyn Côté-Lussier’s research will be the first to identify the role of instantaneous responses in linking social structural factors (e.g., social inequality) and criminal stereotypes to punitive intuitions. It will also make important advancements in terms of establishing the role of intuition in explaining public support for harsh criminal justice policy. The planned studies have received funding from a SSHRC Insight Development grant and will use cutting edge methodologies (e.g., facial electromyography) from the University of Ottawa’s INSPIRE laboratory to detect individuals' rapid intuitive punitive responses. Beginning in Fall 2017, Professor Côté-Lussier will be accepting undergraduate and graduate level research assistants, and graduate level students who wish to work on this project for their thesis.
Les jeunes racisés victimes d’actes criminels et l’accès au continuum de services à Montréal
Conducted by Eduardo González Castillo
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Lived Experiences of Prisoners’ Loved Ones
Conducted by Sandra Lehalle
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Locating Penitentiaries in Canada: How Carceral Space Matters
Conducted by Justin Piché
There are 31 communities across the country that are home to federal penitentiaries operated by Correctional Service Canada (CSC). Whether co-located with other facilities on large parcels of land called “penitentiary reserves” (n=14) or operating as stand-alone sites situated on their own acreage (n=17), these settings have profoundly altered the landscapes upon which they were built and surrounding communities. These sites have also shaped the lived geographies of the thousands of people imprisoned and working within them. This study led by Professor Justin Piché explores how settler colonial nation-building, capitalist restructuring and other forces have shaped where Canadian penitentiaries are located, along with the governing rationalities shaping the spatial organization, policies, practices, and lived experiences of and resistance to federal imprisonment across the country. How the transformation of the landscapes of pen-towns and pen-cities shapes how communities understand their entanglement with imprisonment is also examined.
Miscarriages of Justice
Conducted by Kathryn M. Campbell
Professor Campbell's primary research interest for the past fourteen years has involved examining different facets of miscarriages of justice. She has published research papers on how the wrongly convicted cope with imprisonment, Canadian policy responses to this problem, the impact of errors in pediatric forensic pathology on convictions, how the courts treat expert evidence and how preventive detention strategies may contribute to wrongful convictions. In 2016, she was awarded a European Institutes of Advanced Studies (EURIAS) fellowship as part of the Legitimization of Modern Criminal Law research group at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. While there she undertook a study considering the extent to which strategies of exoneration and compensation for the wrongly convicted enhance procedural justice. Professor Campbell is currently working on a joint comparative law project with Professor Fiona Leverick at the Faculty of Law, University of Glasgow, examining strategies of compensation for the wrongly convicted in both the UK and Canada. Professor Campbell’s other research interests are in the areas of youth justice, Indigenous justice and animal law.
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Strategies for Change
Conducted by Vicki Chartrand
The issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada has been given substantial national media and public attention in the past few years, including the recent government announcement of a National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Today, a significant amount of research and a number of reports document the role that colonialism, policing, systemic violence and media complacency have played in making Indigenous women more vulnerable to violence. Historically, the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women were widely neglected or ignored or were treated as a domestic violence issue or as an “Aboriginal community” problem. This historical lack of attention and neglect of the issue largely resulted in Indigenous families and communities developing their own initiatives and strategies to address the disappearances and murders. Despite the increased focus on the issue today, there has been little public awareness of or research done into how Indigenous families and communities have been addressing the disappearances and murderers of Indigenous women or their related experiences. Through a media scan and interviews, this project being undertaken by adjunct professor Vicki Chartrand will address this gap in knowledge and awareness by considering
- what initiatives have Indigenous families and communities developed to address the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women?
- What have been the personal experiences of Indigenous families and communities from carrying out this work and how has this strengthened or built community?
- How can these initiatives inform a more inclusive approach of justice for Indigenous women and girls and provide a broader understanding of the experiences and contributions of Indigenous peoples in Canada today?
This research will provide an original contribution to understanding the strategies and experiences of Indigenous families and communities to address the disappearances and murders of Indigenous women and how these experiences are more broadly linked to colonialism and other historical and social processes. By exploring and highlighting the contributions of Indigenous families and communities, this work is also part of a broader project to address Canada’s history of colonialism that has created large scale discrepancies in treatment, opportunities, and justice for Indigenous peoples and to help identify the internal strengths and resiliencies present in Indigenous communities, as outlined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). “The urgent need for reconciliation runs deep in Canada. Expanding public dialogue and action on reconciliation beyond residential schools will be critical in the coming years. …Too many Canadians still do not know the history of Aboriginal peoples’ contributions to Canada” (TRC, 2015: 4-5).
NETWORK 16-35: Understanding and Supporting Community-based Social Reintegration of Criminalized Young Adults aged 16 to 35
Conducted by Bastien Quirion
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Psychochirurgie et traitements de choc en psychiatrie : l’exemple du Canada francophone au cours de l’après-guerre
Conducted by Isabelle Perreault and Dahlia Namian
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Quebec-Catalonia comparative analysis of programs and strategies for the recognition of national specificities and the experiences of belonging of Muslim communities
Conducted by Leila Benhadjoudja and David Moffette
This comparative study, conducted by Leila Benhadjoudja and David Moffette, looks at the relationships between programs and strategies put in place to promote the recognition of national specificities in Quebec and Catalonia (language, values, history, etc.), and the experience of belonging and non-belonging of Muslim communities. The research is based on two datasets: one about public programs, training, and discourses promoting national specificities (through a narrative analysis of institutional documents collected in Quebec and Catalonia), and one about the experiences of Muslim communities (through interviews in Montreal and Barcelona). The research engages with questions of nationalism in minority nations, narratives about the nation and the construction of national subjects, racism, Islamophobia, and belonging.
Restorative Justice - The Process of Asking a Third Party in the Case of Conflict: Experiences of Mediators and Facilitators
Conducted by Véronique Strimelle and Françoise Vanhamme
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Role of Mental Health Experts in the Legal Decision-Making and Justification Process
Conducted by David Joubert
This initiative led by professor David Joubert includes a number of inter-related projects in which the evidence presented by mental health or “psy” experts is used in the legal decision-making and subsequent justification for the decision. The role and place taken in Court by such experts has historically been the focus of much discussion and debate. The main purpose of the studies is to examine how psychological and mental health constructs, as well as values and social concerns, become interwoven within the fabric of legal decision-making. Thus, we are looking at the ways in which such constructs may be arranged so as to reinforce the appearance of internal consistency within legal discourse. Ongoing projects are looking at evidence presented by psy-experts in cases of dangerous offender designation, criminal responsibility, mental health review hearings, as well as institutional infractions by inmates and sexual misconduct by mental health professionals. The projects make use of mixed frameworks of analysis, harnessing the best features of both quantitative (latent semantic analysis, multidimensional scaling) and qualitative (latent content analysis) methods.
Securitized Citizens: Canadian Muslims Experiences with Counter Terrorism Policies
Conducted by Baljit Nagra
Dr. Baljit Nagra is currently working on a nationwide qualitative study, consisting of nearly 100 interviews with Canadian Muslim community leaders living in five major Canadian cities (Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver). This study examines the impact of recent changes to citizenship and security laws and policies (i.e. security certificates, passenger protect list, airport/border security, Bill C24, Canadian secret service investigations and visa sponsorship policies) on Muslim communities in Canada. Theoretically, this study explores how racial discourses in state policies and laws reinforce racial hierarchies and social inequalities, altering the meaning of Canadian citizenship and reproducing racialized practices of nation state building in Canada. Ultimately, this research will in specific recommendations on how to improve Canadian state law and policies that disproportionately affect minority communities. This research has been presented at both domestic and international conferences. A chapter from this research titled ‘National Security: Exclusion and Isolation Among Muslims in Canada’, will be published in the forthcoming edited book collection titled Canada Among Nations on terrorism and counterterrorism, Furthermore, Dr. Nagra is preparing several sole-authored and co-authored papers based on this research that speaks to the changing political landscape in Canada, which includes ideological shifts in citizenship, immigration, refugee settlement, religious freedom and national security.
Sentencing
Conducted by Françoise Vanhamme
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
Sociotechnical controversies in green criminology
Conducted by Dominique Robert
Using scientific and public debates on environmental harms caused by practices such as pesticide use and nuclear waste management, Dominique Robert documents the way science and technology produce entities that are multiple and saturated with ontological uncertainties, entities that redefine our common world.
The Prison Transparency Project
Conducted by Jennifer Kilty, João Velloso and Vicki Chartrand
The Prison Transparency Project is an international research and advocacy SSHRC-funded partnership between academics, NGOs, folx with lived experience, advocates, artists, and journalists, working to expose failures of carceral transparency in Argentina, Canada, and Spain. Our goal is to create a knowledge base that will push for greater transparency in carceral systems worldwide and raise awareness of the crisis of transparency in carceral facilities.
Follow us in our efforts to bring change to the world as we know it: https://www.prisontransparencyproject.com/
Trajectories of Institutionalization in Forensic Mental Health Patients
Conducted by David Joubert
This project by is intended to examine the associations between episodes of institutionalization in forensic mental health units in Ontario, mental health indicators, behavior problems, life history, use of treatment and control/disciplinary measures. The study is based on systematic data collection efforts within Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care forensic mental health facilities, over the last 10 years. The project thus allows a prospective look at several dimensions determining the experience of mental health care within close facilities. The analytic method is quantitative, using. This study is relevant in the context of social concerns regarding the use of therapeutic, control and disciplinary measures in forensic and prison institutions.
TSAM : Infrastructure numérique de données de recherche dans la compréhension et la prévention du geste suicidaire
Conducted by Isabelle Perreault, Patrice Corriveau and Jean-François Cauchie
In collaboration with Alexandre Baril, Steven Bittle, Nathalie Burlone, Ari Gandsman, Isabelle Marcoux, Pier-Luc Turcotte
For more information about this project, please consult the French version of this page.
eQuality Project
Conducted by Valerie Steeves
The eQuality Project is a SSHRC-funded partnership that examines the economic model behind e-commerce (i.e. disclosure of information in exchange for service) and maps the ways in which e-marketing analytics sort youth into categories that often reproduce real-world patterns of discrimination and set up young people for conflict. Working with partners in civil society, education and government, we use our data to create educational materials that will help young Canadians push back against online harassment, racism, homophobia and misogyny, and make the most of their digital media experiences. The project also provides opportunities for students to intern at civil society organizations seeking to fight back against cyber-harassment as well as traditional research assistantships.