What are you focused on these days?

My research focuses on two related questions about how evidence on “what works” gets made and used by policymakers. The first is “what works to improve health and education outcomes in low-income countries, and how do we know this?” The second is “how does evidence get used once it exists in Canada?”

On the first question, I’ve spent several years working with data from the Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC), which is the largest-ever donor-funded initiative in girls’ education around the world. All of these projects underwent large-scale evaluations to promote learning across the portfolio, and most of my work has focused on evaluating single programs within this portfolio. But more recently, I’ve been wrapping up a SSHRC-funded project that looks at all thirty-seven GEC projects at once to see how the design of the evaluations of each project affected the decisions about how projects were improved over their lifecycle.

On the second question, I recently published a new paper that examines every evaluation report published in the last ten years by the ten largest federal departments in Canada. I looked at how evaluators define “effectiveness” and found that departments have been drifting towards a focus on how programs are being implemented rather than also focusing on the outcomes these programs achieve, even though Canada’s federal Policy on Results requires programs to focus on outcomes.

Why is this work important right now?

Governments and donor agencies are facing hard choices about what to fund, and knowing what works is essential to make good decisions here. At the same time, making sure evaluations that provide this kind of evidence are done in a way that is informative to policymakers and are ready when they’re needed is really difficult, especially when evaluation systems within organizations are complex. So I’m excited that all the areas of my work have been leading me to think more deeply about not just which programs work, but also the evidence-generating systems that allow us to figure that out. This is particularly relevant in Canada right now, with the national Policy on Results under review. This means the rules governing how every federal department evaluates its programs are being reviewed for the first time since 2016, giving us a rare window where empirical work on evaluation practice can truly shape evaluation policy rather than just describe it.

What is a question you hope to answer with your research?

In the broadest sense, I want to know “Does the kind of evidence an evaluation produces change what an organization actually does afterward?” If evaluations take too long, don’t answer the right questions, don’t create evidence that people trust, or are sycophantic, then evaluations become a performative check-box exercise that uses up valuable time and resources. We have a large literature on evaluation quality and a separate literature on evaluation use, and they rarely meet. I want to bridge that gap.

What is something people would be surprised to learn?

Lots of people have no idea that the federal government publishes reports on nearly every federally funded program in Canada. There are thousands of pages of findings about what works (and doesn’t work) in Canadian public programs that almost no one reads. A lot of my work lately has been focused on using new natural language processing methods to analyze these altogether to figure out what’s working within federal programs (and the evaluations themselves!) in Canada.

Another thing that continues to surprise me is how rarely federal evaluations in Canada try to establish causality in federal programs. While this is definitely not the right approach for every project, there have been huge advancements in methods that can be used to figure out whether programs cause a change in the outcomes they’re targeting. These are widely used by economists and other scholars evaluating programs for academic work, but are barely ever used within federal evaluations even when they could be tremendously informative, and I think this is often a missed opportunity.

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?

Despite my last answer, a common misconception is that methodological complexity is always better. It’s vital to be accurate and rigorous in evaluations, but doing something more complicated like a randomized controlled trial isn’t always better if it answers a question that no one is asking, or will only be ready after answers are needed. Complexity comes with tradeoffs because more complicated evaluations cost more time and resources, so finding the right kind of evaluation design needs to consider the balance of these tradeoffs.

Any new projects you’re excited about?

Yes! I’m currently working on an exciting extension of the paper I published earlier this year on the Policy on Results, looking at what happens after the reports are written. I’m doing this by tying each evaluation report to the management response and action plan, where departments declare what they’re committing to doing in response to an evaluation’s findings. These are the closest thing we have to a record of evaluation use, so I’ve built a new dataset that tracks the relationship between the evaluation findings and the action plans. This will let me figure out what types of evaluation findings are most useful for decision makers, and what kinds of evaluation design choices helped make the findings useful.

What’s your favourite class to teach?

We have the best students at the School of Public Policy and Administration, so this is a really hard choice! I love teaching Evaluation Design for our Diploma in Program and Policy Evaluation students. This is where students get to apply all the theory they learn about evaluation design and bring it to a real-world project that they evaluate over the course of their 16 months in the program. Helping students navigate the very real challenges of doing an evaluation in practice and watching these turn into useful evaluations is such a joy. But I also really love teaching our Microeconomics for Public Policy Analysis in the School’s Master’s of Public Policy and Administration program. A lot of students come to the course feeling either worried about the math involved or very disinterested in all things related to economics. It’s an exciting challenge to get students engaged to see why using economic analysis can be so useful. Usually, by the end of the course, I can directly see the impact my class has had on how students see the world, which is incredibly rewarding.

What is a question you hope to answer with your research?  

As a visual culture scholar, I’m interested in how images shape our understanding of the political structures behind land use, resource extraction, and environmental damage—and how art might offer alternative stories that reshape how we understand climate change. Put simply, how did we arrive at the current crisis, and what new ways of seeing and imagining might help us think about where we go next? 

What are you focused on these days?  

I’m interested in how chemically managed agriculture reshaped our world. My current book project, which I’m cowriting with Jennifer Raab, turns to the nineteenth century when fertilizers made from materials like bones, guano, and rock became vital tools of agriculture. Fertilizers helped feed a rapidly growing global population, but they’ve also driven environmental damage, extractive industries, and forms of colonial control over land and people. 

The elements that make crops grow—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—also underpin the vast system of chemical fertilizers that sustain modern agriculture. We often think about fertilizers as purely technical or neutral tools, simply a matter of feeding crops more efficiently. That framing treats agriculture as a problem of inputs and outputs, rather than as something shaped by history, politics, and power. These elements have transformed not just ecosystems, but economies, labor systems, and entire landscapes.  

What interests me most is how all of this was made to seem normal. Images played a critical role. In maps, advertisements, paintings, scientific diagrams, and photographs, fertile land was portrayed as abundant, empty, and ready for improvement, helping justify agricultural expansion and resource extraction across the Americas. My research traces how these visual and scientific ways of seeing turned soil into something to be managed and optimized. At the same time, I’m exploring how art and visual culture can tell different stories—ones that make these histories visible and open up new ways of thinking about land, responsibility, and the future of food on a changing planet. 

Why is this work important right now?  

Much of the conversation around environmental change focuses on carbon, which frames climate change primarily as an atmospheric problem. But earth system scientists identify nine planetary boundaries that regulate the stability of the biosphere—the limits within which humanity can safely operate. One of these, the boundary for biogeochemical flows, tracks nutrient overload, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, and it has already been crossed due to excessive fertilizer use. When too much of these nutrients runs off into lakes and rivers, it fuels rapid algal growth. As the algae die and decompose, they consume oxygen, creating low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ where aquatic life cannot survive. This growing crisis raises a fundamental challenge: how can we feed the world without destroying the planet? 

What is something people would be surprised to learn?  

One thing that often surprises people is just how literal the phrase “feeding the soil” once was. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, farmers relied on ground-up bones as a key source of nutrients for crops. Animal remains were the primary source, but contemporary reports also suggest that bones were taken from battlefields, tombs, and catacombs, and shipped to factories to be processed into fertilizer. While not all of these accounts can be fully verified, they circulated widely at the time—and align with documented shortages and missing remains—pointing to a moment when agricultural progress was, quite literally, built on the dead. 

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?  

A common misconception is that visual culture and media studies are purely interpretive fields. In reality, they intersect with areas like political economy, science and technology studies, and even data analysis. Together, these approaches offer rigorous and wide-ranging ways to understand how images and media systems shape everything from everyday experience to large-scale political and environmental issues. 

Any new projects you’re excited about?  

I’m working on a project on critical minerals and media technologies in collaboration with Gustave Lester. Critical minerals have become central to contemporary geopolitics, shaping domains that range from energy transitions to digital infrastructures and military systems. Initially defined through the lens of national security, the category has expanded to encompass materials essential to renewable energy systems as well as media technologies such as smartphones, computers, and data centers. 

We are seeing a resurgence of policy and public discourse on critical minerals, and this project examines how the designation itself emerged, how it informs governance and policy frameworks, and what consequences it carries for the environment and media infrastructures. 

What’s your favourite class to teach? 

I teach a special topics class called Material Histories of Photography which involves object-based study at the National Gallery of Canada, Library and Archives Canada, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Canadian Museum of History. It’s a great opportunity for students to work directly with photographic materials and histories—and for all of us to get off our screens! I also really enjoy teaching Environmental Communication, where we explore how environmental issues are represented, mediated, and contested across different platforms and publics. 

What are you focused on these days? 

My focus these days is on working with collaborators and students to share stories of resilience and success in the face of the environmental challenges we face. These are challenging times, whether that’s because of the state of the environment, geopolitics, or the ongoing inequities of settler-colonialism in countries like Canada. My attention is on the ways in which people are working together to address these issues, often in coalitions of settler and Indigenous partners working together. 

Why is this work important right now?  

I believe this is such an exciting time to be alive and working on these issues. The stakes are so high, and the opportunities are vast. To survive as cultures and civilizations, we must do things very differently, while being informed by wisdom traditions that go way back in time. I hope that my work can help to bridge the past and future, while encouraging students to see places for themselves in the exciting work ahead.  

What is a question you hope to answer with your research? 

One project I co-direct, with Māori scholar Prof. John Reid from the University of Canterbury, is entitled â€˜Living Relations’. It is about sharing stories of how Indigenous and settler partners are working together to respond to the food system sustainability transition challenge in Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada. This knowledge sharing project amplifies and builds dialogue among Indigenous-led food systems initiatives to show how they strengthen Indigenous food sovereignty and improve broader societal resilience. I’m intrigued by the questions of how we work together, across cultures, histories and continents, to build a better future together. The answers are subtle. They involve rethinking how we think, and talk, and engage with one another in ways that the western academy has not been very good at.  

What is something people would be surprised to learn? 

I’ve been training to be a meditation teacher and increasingly bring guided meditations into the classroom. I even won a teaching achievement award to do this and will hold an event next year at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ on the topic of Mindful Approaches to Ecopolitics. I discovered mindfulness practices during the pandemic, to grapple with my own anxieties at feeling little control for our collective predicament. I’ve learned that others value these tools and the values that underpin them too. It’s also a whole new type of teaching, as this is less about sharing content and more about sharing ways of approaching our inner experiences.  

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area? 

Many non-Indigenous researchers feel uneasy about engaging in research with Indigenous peoples and communities, feeling it is not their place to do so, or that they will make mistakes. I can understand this. There is much that Indigenous researchers and communities need to take the lead on. And I have made many mistakes. At the same time, decolonization involves all of us. Figuring out how to do this work collaboratively and respectfully is something people of all backgrounds and positionalities can find a place in.  

Any new projects you’re excited about? 

One of my favourite projects these days is the . This is a podcast for students to learn about environmental politics, but its reach has grown widely through platforms like youtube and itunes. The podcast is mostly long-form interviews with prominent environmental activists and academics who have such interesting insights to share! And almost every episode has a discussion about how and where they find ‘hope’. I love the answers we get! I started this podcast with my colleague Prof. Ryan Katz-Rosene from the University of Ottawa during the pandemic, but it’s taken on a life of its own. 

What’s your favourite class to teach? 

I love my environmental politics courses, of which I teach 3 or 4 in political science. Almost all involve real-life simulations, whether of international treaty negotiations, or deliberations on environmental issues facing Canadians. Students learn so much in these exercises. They need to embody diverse perspectives on these issues and then figure out how to find common ground with one another.  

What are you focused on these days?

Two projects, both about whose voices count and who holds power in climate adaptation. The first is the Global Goal on Adaptation, or GGA, which sits within the Paris Agreement as the adaptation counterpart to the 1.5ÂșC mitigation goal. I spent the last two years as one of 78 technical experts, and one of three Canadians, developing a framework of indicators to track progress against that goal. A modified framework was adopted in 2025 at the international climate negotiations (COP30) in BelĂ©m. The newly awarded SSHRC Connection Grant now lets us bring the work home. This grant aims to bring this to the communities and practitioners in Canada so that they can inform our domestic efforts. This effort also focuses our efforts on contributing to the international process, knowing that the sharpest adaptation pressures fall on countries and communities that have had the least hand in setting the terms.

The second is a New Frontiers in Research Fund project called PATH, short for Transforming Places for the Precariously Housed. It works with partners across high- and low-income settings: Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Nepal, including Inuit partners. Canada and the UK have their own pockets of precarity, and our partners in South Africa and Nepal bring long experience with adaptation under constraint. Working across both contexts lets us ask what equitable adaptation looks like for people whose relationship to housing and place is already precarious, wherever they live. While the GGA asks how Canada measures adaptation, at home and in the world, PATH asks what we miss when we measure the wrong things, and it keeps the work anchored in communities whose voices are usually furthest from the tables where indicators get set.

Why is this work important right now?

Climate impacts are also much less abstract for Canadians now. Communities are already rebuilding after wildfires, managing coastal erosion, and watching permafrost thaw. The question is no longer whether to adapt but how to do it well, equitably, and in ways that work across very different regions and knowledge systems. How we measure shapes what we can answer.

The GGA indicators were adopted at the end of 2025, piloting runs from 2026 through 2028, and a full review is scheduled after the global stocktake in 2029. What Canada contributes during this piloting phase will shape how adaptation progress is defined and compared internationally for years. Decisions about whose knowledge counts, and what success looks like, are being made now.

What is a question you hope to answer with your research?

Who decides what successful adaptation looks like, and how do we make sure that answer reflects the people most affected?

Measurement is never neutral. An indicator is a value judgement about what counts, and the GGA has been one of the most contested elements of the Paris Agreement partly because the voices with the most at stake, whether countries in the Global South, Indigenous Peoples, or communities living with precarity in wealthier countries like our own, are routinely absent from the rooms where those decisions get made. Canada has its own pockets of precarity, and our domestic adaptation efforts can reproduce the same exclusions unless we are careful to keep asking who is not in the room.

What is something people would be surprised to learn?

That transformational adaptation is actionable. The term gets used a lot in climate policy, and it is embedded in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports where I have been involved. But, in practice it often shows up as aspirational language rather than a guide to what to do. Part of the problem is that we have talked about transformation a lot without being specific about where it needs to happen or who needs to be making it happen.

Through our work, we argue transformation starts from the futures that people on the margins would want to live in, and it has to bring them into the decisions that shape those futures. Without that, transformational adaptation stays a phrase. With it, it becomes something you can implement.

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?

That adaptation is a technical problem. If we just get the hydrological models right, engineer the correct seawall, or publish an authoritative risk map, the rest will follow. It will not. I say this as someone trained as an engineer, cross-appointed in environmental engineering, and I take the technical work seriously. But adaptation is also a governance problem dressed in technical language. Who gets warned before a flood, who is helped to relocate afterward, which neighbourhoods are judged worth protecting: these are political and distributional decisions, and they determine whether adaptation is effective or whether it deepens existing inequalities. The GGA indicators work is, among other things, an attempt to take that observation seriously at the international level.

Any new projects you’re excited about?

The Canadian side of the GGA work is where most of my attention is turning. After two years in the international expert group, the more interesting question now is what these indicators can mean on the ground here, and how our answers land alongside what is being asked for internationally. Those two conversations are too often treated as separate in Canada, and they are not.

What’s your favourite class to teach?

The Climate Change Collaborative graduate seminar. It pulls together students from across the university, engineers, physical sciences, geographers, and economists, and puts them in the same room on the same problem. It takes everyone slightly out of their comfort zone, which is exactly the point. Climate adaptation does not respect disciplinary lines, and the students who will do this work for the next thirty years cannot afford to either. What I appreciate most is watching how quickly they start building something together. It is a small reminder that the adaptability question also runs through our classrooms.

At a moment when executive authority is under renewed scrutiny, Philippe Lagassé is tracing the roots and limits of supreme military command. His work connects centuries-old constitutional ideas to modern debates on defence spending, procurement, and democratic accountability.

What are you focused on these days?

My academic research is focused on the history of supreme military command authority and contemporary powers of Commanders-in-Chief in liberal democracies. This is part of a new Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I’m leading a multidisciplinary team of political scientists, legal scholars, and historians examining how supreme military command authority has evolved over time and what powers are considered inherent in the office of Commanders-in-Chief today.

In addition to my academic work, I write two newsletters, one on Canadian defence policy and procurement, called Debating Canadian Defence, and the other on the Westminster system, called In Defence of Westminster. The newsletters are more targeted at practitioners and focused on contributing to public debate.

Why is this work important right now?

As we’re seeing with the second Trump presidency, the powers of Commanders-in-Chief are considerable. Chief executives are expected to use these powers, and the discretion they provide, to protect national security. But these powers can also be abused. Our project on Commanders-in-Chief became especially important after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a President enjoys immunity when acting in their official capacity. Since the Commander-in-Chief is an official capacity, the stakes involved with uses and abuses of these powers became even greater.

I use my Debating Canadian Defence newsletter to critically analyse, and offer sardonic takes on, defence policy and procurement at a time when these issues are becoming increasingly important in Canada. Prime Minister Carney has outlined a significant increase in defence spending and the government is looking to speed up the acquisition of military capabilities, notably through the establishment of a Defence Investment Agency. Canada is also increasing military spending by tens of billions. My aim is to put these developments in context and make sure that readers appreciate some of the trade-offs Canada is facing.

What is a question you hope to answer with your research?

Our project on supreme military command authority aims to understand what powers are inherent in offices of Commander-in-Chief and similar positions in liberal democracies today. To do that, we’re going all the way back to the Roman Republic to look at the original concept of supreme command authority, imperium, and tracing how it evolved over time until the present. We want to see how these authorities have expanded or contracted, and we want to compare how the powers of Commanders-in-Chief vary between countries. Basically, we want to know what powers are viewed as essential to these offices and under what conditions they are allowed to act independently of legislatures and with deference from the courts. We want to understand the boundaries that Commanders-in-Chief should operate under in liberal democracies today.

On the defence procurement side, I’m aiming to inform people about why it’s so hard to buy military capabilities, even when there’s a push to simplify processes. I also try to show why it will be hard for Canada to distance itself from the United States militarily, and what it will actually take to build up a vibrant defence industrial base.

What is something people would be surprised to learn?

I’ve been asked how I came to research two fairly distinct subjects, defence policy and constitutional studies. I originally began working on the Westminster system as part of a project on Canadian civil-military relations. I saw that one could only understand the constitutional and legal frameworks behind Canadian civil-military relations by studying the Crown, Cabinet, and Parliament. My current research on supreme military command authority extends that thinking to liberal democratic regimes beyond those that are part of the Westminster system. The project is animated by the idea that military and political authorities are closely connected and that we can understand a lot about constitutional systems by studying how they empower and constrain the use of armed force.

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?

Studying defence policy and procurement doesn’t necessarily involve focusing on specific military capabilities or equipment. Defence policy and procurement are more about public administration and governance than military operations and tactics. It’s not that different from studying, say, health policy. Those who research health policy aren’t focused on medicine per se. Like students of defence policy and procurement, they’re often more focused on things like process and organizational structures.

Any new projects you’re excited about?

Right now, I’m excited about a book I’m co-authoring with Emmett Macfarlane from University of Waterloo on Canada’s unwritten constitution. We’re nearly done and the book feels like the culmination of many years of research on the subject for me.

What’s your favourite class to teach?

My class on Canadian government is definitely my favourite. I love discussing the finer points of our system of government and why it matters for students who are embarking on careers in the public service.

Field Notes
Daniel Rosenbloom, School of Public Policy & Administration

Professor Daniel Rosenbloom’s research sits at the intersection of climate, energy, and innovation policy. Grounded in , he studies the policy dimensions of past and present transitions in energy systems. His work develops governance strategies for overcoming resistance to and accelerating decarbonization pathways in Canada and abroad. 

What are you working on these days? 

My work as the Ivey Research Chair in Sustainability Transitions keeps me very busy. 

I’m currently leading a SSHRC Insight Development Grant that maps stakeholder positions surrounding electrification across Canada. Electrification, understood as shifting energy end-uses met through fossil fuels to clean electricity sources, is well recognized as the most credible pathway for reaching our climate commitments. This project aims to reveal where the main points of friction lie across sectors and regions, unpack the basis for these frictions, and formulate policy strategies to smooth out electrification pathways. A highlight of this project is collaborating with colleagues from across Canada and several bright ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ students. 

I also continue to work closely with policy practitioners on unfolding energy transitions. A major focus right now is developing decisionsupport frameworks that help decision-makers align nearterm choices with longterm netzero transformations. This work connects to my role on the Executive Committee of the Energy Modelling Hub â€“ a national consortium of universities dedicated to enhancing Canada’s modelling capacity and insights, which . It also links to work I am conducting with the Sustainability Transitions Research Network on enhancing science-policy engagement and impact. 

Beyond this, I am coediting a special issue on accelerating netzero transitions with Karoline Rogge (Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex) and Qi Song (Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, Cambridge University). The goal of this work is to sharpen how we conceptualize â€˜acceleration’ in transition processes and to highlight practical interventions that can support more rapid change. Contributing to this, I’m collaborating with Runa Das through another Insight Development Grant focused on regulatory innovation, which explores how regulators can become agents of accelerated change. 

Then there are dozens of individual paper projects and collaborations stretching across transition topics and contexts â€“ many of which involve our students. 

What piqued your interest in sustainability transitions? 

Early in my career I focused on the individual motivations for poor environmental outcomes, drawing on insights from psychology. But quite quickly, it became clear to me that the systems that condition individual behaviour merit the bulk of our attention. This is what drew me to both policy and transition perspectives as together they offer critical insights on how technological, political, and institutional dynamics interact in shaping societal trajectories.  

I was also drawn to a field that isn’t afraid to be normative. Indeed, it is important to understand that our work is inseparable from the urgent societal problems we aim to address. 

In the same way, I value that the field is solution‑focused. It doesn’t stop at diagnosing or deconstructing problems but asks what kinds of governance arrangements, policy mixes, and institutional reforms might actually move us toward more sustainable futures. 

What is something people would be surprised to learn? 

People are often struck to learn about the drivers behind the profound and sometimes quite rapid transformations of the past. Consider, for instance, how the shift from horsedrawn carriages to internal combustion engine vehicles in the early 20^th century took only a few short decades and was propelled in part by a deepening public health crisis surrounding the accumulation of horse manure in major urban centres. These types of transition histories show that deep changes can occur more quickly than we tend to assume when the right pressures, innovations, business models, and policy signals align. 

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area? 

An important misconception is that transitions are primarily technological shifts induced by markets â€“ that they happen because a better widget is invented and markets follow. Rather, transitions relate not only to technologies and markets but also policy interventions, business models, and political struggles. Returning to the diffusion of the automobile, this technology benefitted from technical advancements but also from a business strategy focused on mass production and decades of favourable state efforts, from the build out of road networks to the design of cities. The governance of sustainability transitions can learn from these episodes of change to deploy a much wider set of policy tools. It is not enough to passively encourage innovation, get the market structure right, and then wait for change to happen. 

Any new projects you’re excited about? 

One major initiative that I am quite energized about is my work with Professor James Meadowcroft to join up and strengthen the Canadian community of transitions scholars and practitioners. In November 2025, we brought together scholars from across the country to articulate a shared agenda for transitions research and action anchored in Canadian realities. The goal here is to both strengthen the Canadian community but also further translate transition insights to our context so that we can realize desirable futures. 

What’s your favourite class to teach? 

SERG 5005: Applied Interdisciplinary Project is a clear favourite of mine for three reasons. First, it is built around the principle of experiential learning, whereby students work handson with real societal partners on actual transition challenges. This year, student teams are working with societal partners on building out microgrids in Quebec, carbon dioxide removal solutions in the Prairies, and electrifying mass transit in the City of Cornwall. Second, it is solution oriented. I push students to design actionable proposals that help build along credible and prosperous pathways to net-zero. Third, it is fundamentally interdisciplinary. Recognizing that sustainability challenges span disciplinary boundaries, students from engineering and policy backgrounds work together to integrate insights from technology, economics, business, and policy. Overall, the course mirrors the systems approaches needed to advance transitions in practice, and these are precisely the skills policymakers are seeking in the job market. 

Field Notes
Erin Tolley, Political Science

Professor Erin Tolley studies how race and gender shape who runs for office, who gets elected, and how power works in Canada. Her research challenges myths about representation and tackles urgent issues like the harassment of municipal leaders, helping build a more inclusive understanding of Canadian politics.

What are you working on these days? 

Broadly, my research looks at how race and gender shape politics in Canada. This includes work that focuses on why women and racialized minorities run for office, the experiences they have once they get there, and how race and gender shape the ways Canadians think about political representation. I also spend a lot of time thinking about how to better study these questions and whether there are ways to improve our methodological toolkit. 

What piqued your interest in the relationship between socio-demographic diversity and political representation in Canada? 

For me, there wasn’t a clear a-ha moment where suddenly I knew what I was meant to do. However, looking back, I can see where some of the seeds were planted. I grew up in Saskatchewan in the 1990s when the country was embroiled in a series of constitutional crises, so politics was sort of all around me at that time. I went to university with the intention of becoming a journalist and, as part of that training, I was required to take a political science course, something I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about. But that course made me realize that politics isn’t just something people read about in the newspaper or argue about around the dinner table: politics is about how we live and get along as a community. So that was a turning point. I then started to think about who gets to make those decisions, whether that power is equitably distributed, and how identities like race and gender might be part of the explanation. 

What is a question you hope to answer with your research? 

Introductory political science courses often tell students that politics is about “who gets what, when, and how,” which comes from the title of a book published in the 1930s. Nearly 100 years later, those questions all remain relevant. I hope that my research helps people understand that politics is not a neutral, disembodied space. Answers to questions about the distribution of power can’t be divorced from identity. As I tell my students, no one talks about the “mothers” of Confederation because they weren’t allowed at the decision-making table; that exclusion, and others, is infused into Canada’s institutional DNA. My research asks how these legacies continue to shape political behaviour, representation and outcomes today. 

What is something people would be surprised to learn? 

Almost 15 years ago, I published a paper called, “Do Women Do Better in Municipal Politics?” It countered the conventional (and somewhat stereotypical) wisdom that women will find greater electoral success in local politics, which is often viewed as kinder, gentler, and closer to so-called women’s interests. Although that belief was widespread, I showed there was little evidence for it: women’s electoral success was approximately the same at the federal, provincial and municipal levels in Canada, a conclusion that remains true today. Even so, the conventional wisdom persists, so people are often surprised to learn it’s not the case.   

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area? 

There are two misconceptions that I encounter fairly frequently. The first is that research incorporating attention to race and gender is â€œniche” and therefore less important than research on, say, national security or foreign policy. The reason this is a misconception is that race and gender absolutely shape how decisions about those areas are made, who makes them, and how they are received by the public. If we think that identity is somehow apolitical or pre-political or not political science, we aren’t fully understanding the world around us, and our conclusions will be flawed. 

The second misconception is that only quantitative or statistical approaches to the study of politics are rigorous or sophisticated and that qualitative approaches are somehow “easier” and more “biased.” As someone who uses both types of methods, I find this viewpoint so limited and damaging. The political world is enormously complicated: people are unpredictable, they exist in uncontrolled environments, and they don’t always tell us the truth! So we need to study political problems using a variety of approaches. That’s the only way we’re going to get to rich, nuanced explanations that we are confident are leading us in the right direction. 

Any new projects you’re excited about? 

The last time I counted, I had more than a dozen different papers and projects on the go, so it’s hard to pick just one. But one that I am particularly focused on right now looks at the harassment of elected officials in Canadian municipalities. This study is part of the Canadian Municipal Barometer, which is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Every year, our research team is surveying mayors and councillors across the country, so we now have a lot of new insights on their experiences, including differences related to their gender, race, and other factors. Municipal associations across the country have recently characterized harassment as a “serious problem” that has “reached crisis levels,” and our research will help address this issue. 

What’s your favourite class to teach? 

I have been lucky to always teach classes in areas that interest me, which means I’ve never had to slog through anything I really didn’t like. For the past few years, I’ve taught PSCI 4506, which focuses on Women, Power and Political Representation, which gives me an opportunity to read and discuss research directly related to my own interests. How lucky is that? Getting paid to do things you would want to do anyway! The other part of teaching that I value is the mentorship I get to engage in with students in my Gender, Race, and Inclusive Politics Lab. We write together collectively, and we meet regularly to talk about research and academic life. I love this kind of community-building, and it’s central to how I see my role as a researcher and teacher.  

Field Notes 
Jane Dickson, Law and Legal Studies

Jane Dickson’s work focuses on strengthening Indigenous access to justice through the development, training, and evaluation of Gladue reports and culturally informed sentencing practices.

Can you offer a “lay” description of your research topic? 

My research area is Indigenous access to justice, most notably in the criminal justice sphere and with a focus on what are called the ‘Gladue principles’ across the criminal justice system and increasingly, into other areas of law as well. These principles require the courts to consider the unique background and circumstances of an Indigenous person and any alternatives to incarceration that are reasonable given the offence and degree of culpability of the offender.  

Ideally, this information is provided to the courts in the form of a Gladue report. I train people to write these reports and have completed several research projects on the impacts of those reports and the Gladue principles more generally; I have also evaluated some of the largest Gladue service providers in the country. 

What piqued your interest in this topic? 

 My research originally focused on the reclamation of Indigenous law and legal structures through the revitalization and implementation of that law and structures within First Nations.  

However, It quickly became apparent that outside governments were supportive of ‘restorative justice projects’ but much less so of the reinstitution of traditional law. This led to me shift my attention to addressing inequities in the colonial system and to focus on Gladue, sentencing and pushing back on the mass incarceration of Indigenous people in Canada. 

What question were you hoping to answer in your research? 

 Broadly speaking, how can we better respect and support Indigenous justice systems within Indigenous nations and maximize access to justice for Indigenous citizens who become involved with the colonial justice system?

What is something people would be surprised to learn? 

The Department of Law and Legal Studies houses the Ottawa Pro Bono Gladue Project, which I run with my former graduate student, Kerry MacDonell. We have a group of certified Gladue writers who volunteer to provide reports to Indigenous people in the Ottawa-Kingston area; we are now also supporting people across Canada, which is very exciting and keeps us very busy. 

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area? 

The biggest misconception is that Gladue considerations are a ‘get out of jail free card’ – since the advent of Gladue in 1999, rates of incarceration of Indigenous people have continued to climb. Since 2000/2001, the incarcerated Indigenous population has risen by 56.2% 

Any new projects that you’re excited about? 

I have a few very exciting projects on the horizon, but will just mention one, which is a research project to support the development of national standards for Gladue reports, Gladue writers and Gladue training. This is important to me as a Gladue writer, educator and ally of Indigenous people who understands the challenges of this work and the magnitude of task Gladue is intended to address.

What’s your favourite class to teach? 

That’s a tough question! I like teaching first year very much but am presently also enjoying teaching my fourth-year seminar, which exposes students to the research on Gladue and to those working with Gladue in the system. I am fortunate to have a number of amazing guest speakers, including the Chief of the Ottawa Police Service, Indigenous and non-Indigenous senior Judges and Justices of the Peace of the Ontario Court of Justice, Crown and defence counsel, Gladue writers, and the Director of Special Projects at the Office of the Federal Correctional Investigator. It is a great blend of theory and practice. The course has also opened up employment opportunities for some of my students and helped others to locate mentors and resources to assist them with careers in the law and legal services.  

Mehdi Ammi investigates the long-term value of preventive public health spending, analyzing how smarter investments can save lives and improve population health.

Can you offer a “lay” description of your research topic? 

If only I had just one! I’m half-joking there, but I’m a curious person, and it seems that answering one research question tends to lead to more. There’s a bit of a sprawl of research interests. Still, my research falls within health economics, health policy, health services research, and public health. Overall, I want to understand how the characteristics of health and healthcare systems can be modified to balance comprehensive access, high quality, and low cost of care, along with healthcare providers’ satisfaction, and ultimately improve population health. This is known as the quintuple aim, and my research touches on different aspects of it. 

One of the things I’m particularly interested in is the value of expenditures on public health, meaning spending that’s more preventive than curative. These expenditures tend to be small, around 5% of total health spending in Canada. While there’s a general sense that prevention is better than cure, I’m trying to understand the differential returns of spending on preventive versus curative care. 

What piqued your interest in this topic? 

For my overall research topic in health, I’d say it’s not what got me into economics in the first place. Initially, I was interested in finance – until I realized I really, really didn’t like the idea of making more money from money. I discovered health economics, along with other areas related to human capital (like labour and education), and realized this was more “me.” Health raised fascinating problems: it’s mainly public, full of market issues like information asymmetry and uncertainty, and lacks real prices to guide resource allocation. That intrigued me, and I thought, maybe research in this area could actually help improve society. 

As for the value of public health expenditures, two things made it both interesting and challenging. First, when public health succeeds, nothing happens. It prevents bad things from occurring, so how do you prove you matter when success looks like nothing? Second, despite its importance, public health is often under attack, seen as paternalistic or an easy target during austerity. Third, I kept hearing from public health professionals and decision-makers that they needed evidence to justify their budgets, especially given pressures on hospitals and primary care. I didn’t know what the answer would be, but it felt like an important and fascinating puzzle. 

What question were you hoping to answer in your research? 

I wanted to see whether public health produces results in the long run, over several decades. As I mentioned, nothing happens immediately in public health, but what about all the lives saved down the road? Can we measure that? It turns out there’s some good, long-term data from national agencies and the OECD, spanning 40 to 50 years. Plus, new econometric methods now exist to address known issues in these datasets. 

With co-authors, we did two studies. One focused in Canada, looking at all the provinces, published last year. And one looking at OECD countries, including Canada of course, published last month. Go read them, they are both open-access thanks to Tri-Council funding: and .  

What is something people would be surprised to learn? 

The punchline is that public health spending does make a difference in the long run. A 10% increase in public health expenditures leads to a 2% decrease in preventable mortality in Canada over the past forty years. Across OECD countries, a 10% increase in preventive spending reduces all-cause mortality by 1% and increases life expectancy at age 65 by 0.4% over fifty years. 

That might not sound dramatic, but remember, curative spending saves lives now, while preventive spending saves lives later. And given that public health accounts for only around 6% of total spending in Canada in 2024 ($22 billion out of $372 billion), those long-run effects are pretty remarkable. It’s not about cutting curative care, of course, people who show up in emergency rooms need treatment. But it’s a reminder: just because the benefits aren’t visible right away doesn’t mean it’s not working. 

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area? 

The number one thing I hear is that “health isn’t about money.” I agree. It’s not about money; it’s about value. They’re not the same thing. The biggest misconception is that health economists only care about cutting costs. That’s completely wrong. We’re social scientists trying to understand how people and societies work, including incentives, efficiency, and equity. 

We don’t say, “cut here.” We ask, “If you had $1 more, where could it do the most good?” Maybe that dollar saves more lives in prevention than in hospitals, or vice versa. Our role is to bring evidence to the table, not to dictate policy, but to help make it better informed. 

Any new projects that you’re excited about? 

I have too many projects, and I’m excited about all of them! That’s the beauty of being a professor: you choose what you want to work on (as long as you can fund it). If it doesn’t excite you, you just don’t do it.

Some projects I can’t talk about yet. Research ideas are only good if they’re original! But one I can share is a grant proposal on the impacts of public health expenditures on equity. We know these expenditures improve health in the long run, but we don’t know for whom. For example, do the health gains go mostly to wealthier groups, or do they help reduce disparities? The project will develop measures of health disparities in Canada (by income, ethnicity, gender, and more) and test whether public health spending helps narrow them. What I find especially rewarding is the number of public health policy makers and practitioners involved as full partners. That’s what “research for the public good” should look like in my mind. 

What’s your favourite class to teach? 

I am in a graduate school. At the Master’s level, it’s my Health Policy in Canada (PADM 5221) elective in the Master of Public Policy and Administration program. The title says it all (and if that’s not obvious, you clearly weren’t paying attention
  go back and read from the start). 

At the PhD level, it’s the Doctoral Seminar (PADM 6201) in the PhD in Public Policy program. I love it because it’s about teaching future researchers what a research plan really is: how to come up with interesting, answerable questions and secure the resources (financial, human, intellectual) to get the work done. The course is different every year depending on the students’ interests and methodologies. It’s also a humbling experience; it pushes me to revisit the foundations of social sciences. I learn something new every time I teach it. Remember, I’m a curious person! 

By creating the Mary Ann Shadd Cary Centre for Journalism and Belonging, Nana aba Duncan is working to expand how we think about journalism—by amplifying underrepresented voices, challenging the lack of diversity in Canadian newsrooms, and carrying forward Shadd Cary’s legacy through a new lecture series.

What led you to create the ? 

When I learned about Mary Ann Shadd Cary, I thought, why am I just learning about her now? She was the first Black woman to publish and edit a newspaper in Canada—The Provincial Freeman in 1853. She’s also the first woman to publish a newspaper in North America.  

My hope was to create a place where people are inspired to continue thinking about journalists and journalism and media in a more expansive way. I mean, I’m Black and my research has to do with reporting in Black communities and the experiences of Black journalists. But my goal for our industry is to always be thinking about those who are not represented or underrepresented or misrepresented, and to consider them at the intersection of journalism. 

How diverse are newsrooms in Canada in 2025?

The Canadian Association of Journalists runs a diversity survey every year and invariably every year you see that there are low numbers of Black people who are part of the industry. In about 66% of the newsrooms that participated in the survey, there are no Black people, no people of color.

And so for the center, my hope is that we just are always thinking about inclusion and diversity, deeply and in whatever ways that maybe we haven’t thought of before. For example, I have lived most of my life not thinking about disability because of my privileges, but this is a place where I can consider disabled journalists.

It’s really important because so many of our newsrooms, if you go and look at their mandates, many of them say they want to represent the diversity of Canada. And if you’re going to do that, it means that you have to have those folks in your newsrooms, and you have to support them in the way that they need to be awesome.

How does a newsroom change when marginalized voices are heard?

It’s really important that we take the opportunities that we can to highlight the achievements of Black people in journalism and to recognize the impact that they have when they do enter newsrooms.
Something that I say to my students is that, when it comes to Black people or any person who is part of a marginalized community, if they come into a newsroom and they say that this issue is important to my community, who is the expert?

You’re the expert. It doesn’t mean that you know everything, but it means that if you are saying something is important to your community, then other people should listen.

You’re hosting the first ever Mary Ann Shadd Cary Lecture on October 6, as part of the Mary Ann Shadd Cary Lecture Series: Voices of Change in Canadian Journalism. How will this contribute to Shadd Cary’s legacy?

This lecture series, which was the idea of my colleague Trish Audette-Longo, is the first lecture series in the School of Journalism and Communication named after a woman. It will feature leading women and non-binary journalists from historically under- and misrepresented communities who will share their stories and expertise.

Our inaugural lecturer is Camille Dundas, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of ByBlacks.com, Canada’s leading Black online magazine. We’ll also hear from Adrienne Shadd, a descendant of Shadd Cary.

Find out more about the Mary Ann Shadd Cary Lecture.