Dr. William HĂŠbert and Dr. Michael Christensen are two recipients of this year’s SSHRC Insight Development Grants. These grants support research in its early stages, enabling “the development of new research questions, as well as experimentation with new methods, theoretical approaches and/or ideas.”

Learn more about their research below.

William HĂŠbert, Assistant Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies

Entitled “A Critical Analysis of Emerging Policy Solutions to the `Problem’ of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder in Canada’s Criminal Justice System,” this project looks at Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and how it has emerged and materialized as a criminal justice problem in Canada. ($54,776).

Michael Christensen, Assistant Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies

Entitled “A Cultural Typology of Vaccine Misinformation,” this research project will develop a new way to understand and address misinformation surrounding measures to control COVID-19. Christensen is working with co-applicants Sarah Everts from the School of Journalism and Communication and Majid Komeili from Computer Science. ($70,790).

You can learn more about these grants here: 2021 SSHRC Insight Development Grants.

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Professor Megan Gaucher and Professor Dale Spencer have each been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant for their respective research projects.

Mapping the Discursive and Institutional Landscape of ‘Birth Tourism’ and its Perceived Attack on Canadian Birthright Citizenship

Professor Megan Gaucher has been awarded a five-year $223,328 Insight Grant for her research project. Birth tourists – a term used to describe non-resident mothers who give birth on Canadian soil so that their child has a claim to Canadian birthright citizenship – are accused of undermining Canada’s jus soli citizenship laws and subsequently ‘queue jumpers’. While the practice of birth tourism is completely legal and statistically low, birth tourism continues to be identified as an issue in need of legislative remedy. Calls for legislative action however, remain reliant on an incomplete picture of the empirical dynamics of birth tourism. This project will provide the first comprehensive mapping of the state of birth tourism in Canada and will critically interrogate how multiple socio-legal spaces are used to both criminalize and restrict access to non-resident mothers and their future children. This study will explore how constructions of foreignness undermine the longstanding assumption that formal legal citizenship is an uncontested condition for membership to the Canadian state and explore how political and public discourse around birth tourism ultimately reproduces settler-colonial imaginaries of “good” familial citizens.

Read more about Professor Gaucher’s Insight Grant research project. 

Probing the Registry: Police Management and Monitoring of the National Sex Offender Registry

Professor Dale Spencer received a five-year $173,717 Insight Grant for his research project that focuses on the RCMP and municipal police officers managing the national sex offender registry to look at how the registry is used in Canada, how collaborations between the RCMP and other policing organizations are interpreted by officers and how the registry serves to manage persons convicted of sex offenses (PCSO) in the community. The project will involve focus groups with RCMP members in registry centres and interviews with officers in police organizations across Canada. Prof. Spencer says, “We’ll look at police culture, experiences and practices related to the management of the registry itself and the monitoring of those who are named.”

Read more about Professor Spencer’s Insight Grant research project. 

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Law and Legal Studies Research Spotlight

The Department of Law and Legal Studies’ Research Spotlight Series highlights our faculty members’ innovative research grants and projects.

In this inaugural post, we feature the research of Dale Spencer, Associate Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University. Dr. Spencer’s research on violence, victimization, the 60s scoop’ and settler colonial projects, and digital worlds and the young people who engage with them, is both innovative and responsive to the important and often under examined aspects of our history, daily life, and future possibilities.

A Researcher on the Rise

Dale Spencer joined the Department in 2014 and is Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies. Spencer’s work is empirically grounded and theoretically rich and contributes to understandings of violence and victimization across numerous contexts.

As a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Spencer researched sexual victimization, including responses by non-governmental agencies and police. Since then, his focus has expanded beyond criminological concerns to include important contributions to social theory, qualitative methods, and explorations of violence and victimization in different contexts, including corrections, elderly care, forced adoption, and sport.

Spencer has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles including in journals such as the British Journal of Criminology, Body and Society, Theoretical Criminology, Punishment and Society, Journal of Youth Studies, and Ethnography. Spencer was awarded the Ontario Early Researcher Award (2017, $150,000), the Faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence award (2019, $15,000), and the ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Faculty Graduate Mentoring Award (2020).

Strongly committed to mentoring, supervising, and publishing with graduate students, Spencer has six ongoing funded projects including:

Policing Sex Crimes

This Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project explores police investigator attitudes and interpretations of sex crime survivors and the complex bureaucratic infrastructure that has formed in response to sex crime victims.

Spencer’s forthcoming book entitled Policing Sex Crimes (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) offers an overview of the affordances and difficulties of investigating and responding to sex crimes in contemporary digital society. With co-authors Rose Ricciardelli (Memorial University) and Department of Law and Legal Studies PhD graduate Alexa Dodge (Dalhousie University), he elucidates how victims are interpreted by police officers and the challenges they face achieving justice in the wake of sexual victimization. Policing Sex Crimes also probes thornier issues regarding sex crime investigations, such as how police investigators’ experiences of watching cases flounder in court can lead to a cynicism that impacts their judgement of the viability of sexual assault cases.

Pekiwewin, Coming Home (aka the 60s Scoop project)

Spencer is a co-investigator (with principal investigator Raven Sinclair, University of Regina) on the SSHRC funded Pekiwewin project, which examines the period between 1950 and 1985, now referred to as the “60s scoop”, during which no less than 20,000 Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes across Canada as a part of a broader settler colonial project.

This study consists of two subprojects, archival/document research and a qualitative matrix, designed to unearth the architecture of the Indigenous Welfare era and reveal the nature of how obscure and questionable policies were reified, and subsequently inscribed, into the culture and practice of Indigenous Child Welfare.

Digital Worlds and Young People

Funded through his Ontario Early Researcher Award, this project seeks to fill knowledge gaps both within Canada and beyond regarding youth and the impact of the digital worlds with which they engage.

This mixed methods research project is committed to listening to the viewpoints and perspectives of young people and using those perspectives to analyze how digital worlds foster and aid in youth’s development of their identities and senses of belonging, as well as their experiences of loneliness and friendship online.  Alongside Department of Law and Legal Studies PhD student Jean Ketterling and Department of Law and Legal Studies PhD graduate, Daniella Bendo (King’s UW), Spencer is writing a book manuscript on youth experiences of digital artifacts and the plethora of online platforms that they utilize.

More about Dale Spencer

You can find out more about Dr. Dale Spencer’s research, publications and more on his Faculty Profile page.

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Publishing is a vital part of emerging scholar’s academic work. However, the pathway to publishing is often not equal for underrepresented scholars due to inequities in available mentorship, resources and training.

Providing an inclusive platform for equity, diversity and inclusion in academia and academic publishing is a key goal for the Managing Editor, Professor Melanie Adrian, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Chair in Teaching Innovation and founder of ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Scholars at Risk program. To help address the time-intensive and often under prioritized mentorship needs of scholars from underrepresented communities, CJLS launched the SSRHC funded Scholar Collaboration Program/Le Programme de collaboration acadĂŠmique (SCP/PCA) in January 2021.

SCP provides collaborative opportunities for underrepresented scholars in the field of socio-legal studies. The program pairs exceptional emerging scholars with mentors experienced in academic publishing and intends to support these emerging scholars as they prepare manuscripts to be submitted to the CJLS.

As part of the process of creating such a program, CJLS collaborated with Ă‡ağlar DĂślek, an emerging scholar from Turkey, current Department of Law and Legal Studies contract instructor, and graduate of ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University’s PhD in Sociology. Through a combination of digital ethnography of internationally renowned journals mentorship program, Dr. DĂślek evaluated and reported on how scholar mentorship programs are run to help inform the SCP program’s approach to inclusive mentorship.

By employing a research-based approach to creating the SCP, CJLS has united the goals of promoting equitable publishing opportunities with practical research backed solutions.

Read more about CJLS’s Collaboration with Underrepresented Scholars.

Submitting a Manuscript

The Scholar Collaboration Program is for PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows and emerging researchers and faculty who are in need of the resources offered by the program. Manuscript submissions from scholars in underrepresented or minority communities and/or from the Global South are invited to apply to the first round of applications by March 15, 2021. More information: .

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Congratulations Dr. Dale Spencer!

Associate Professor Dale Spencer is the 2020 recipient of two grants, the and the .

SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant ($24,246) – Dr. Dale Spencer, Principle Investigator, COVID-19, Serious Leisure, and Risk Tolerance: A case study of a crossfit gym.

CIHR Project Grant ($260,101) – Dr. Dale Spencer, Co-Investigator, Safe places for aging and care? A site-specific analysis of features influencing violence in care for older adults. 

Read more about Dr. Spencer’s research interests and work: faculty profile.

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Professor Sebastien Malette has focused on unrecognized MĂŠtis and non-status Indigenous communities in the Eastern provinces of Canada. He is the co-author of three books on the subject, including his latest, entitled Bois-BrulĂŠs: The untold story of the MĂŠtis of Western QuĂŠbec (UBC, 2020).

His latest project, funded by a $203,999 SSHRC Insight Grant, is entitled “Métis Acadians? An investigation into the legal arguments of the Kouchibouguac families against her Majesty the Queen.” It considers how one hundred Acadian Métis families who were expropriated when Kouchibouguac Park was created are now deploying a new legal strategy. They are demanding compensation from Canada under an alleged ancestral title under the protection of Hereditary Mi’kmaq chief Stephen Augustine.

“This innovative argument allows us to move beyond accusations that the Eastern Métis would necessarily pose an existential threat to Indigenous sovereignties,” explains Malette. “Rather, by accommodating those Acadian Métis willing to adhere to and assume their responsibilities vis-à-vis Indigenous laws and institutions to ensure their recognition as championed by Chief Augustine, the Acadian Métis diaspora could very well be in a position to side-step the Canadian legal mechanism of recognition derived by section 35 altogether in favour of Indigenous legal norms. In such a radical anti-colonial scenario, the Acadian Métis would thus reinforce existing Mi’kmaq political and legal institutions rather than competing against them.”

In collaboration with anthropologists, Drs. Michel Bouchard (UNBC), Siomonn Pulla (Royal Roads University) and Denis Gagnon (University of Saint-Boniface), this project will explore the historical and ethnographic evidence associated with the Acadian MĂŠtis diaspora, as well as the legal implications associated with this novel argument articulated by the families of Kouchibouguac.

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Congratulations to Prof. Doris Buss and Prof. Blair Rutherford (Department of Sociology and Anthropology) who have won a ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University COVID-19 Rapid Research Response Grant.

In response to COVID-19, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ developed an internal funding opportunity to provide seed funding for original, innovative, and time-sensitive research to propose solutions to the challenges posed by this pandemic.

Attending (to) Class: Intersectional Study of COVID-19 Adaptation in Universities in Canada and Africa, will focus on one university in each of Canada, Kenya, and Sierra Leone. With universities across the globe rapidly moving their curriculums online, this pilot study examines the gendered, socio-economic, racialized, and rural/urban contexts that shape access and participation in distance education for women and men students. The project will also look at access and use of the technology (phones, computers, internet) needed for distance education, and the differences in class, race, and rural/urban locations, alongside other obligations, including caring roles, that women and men students navigate when undertaking their studies. The research team, including Professors Aisha Ibrahim (University of Sierra Leone), Sarah Kinyanjui (University of Nairobi), and student researchers from each university, will conduct interviews and focus group discussions with students and university administrators at each institution. The resulting data on intersecting inequalities and student access to distance learning will inform ongoing COVID-19 responses.

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Meeting the Challenges of Gladue: An Inquiry into the Use of Social Context Information in Judicial Determination of Sentences for Indigenous Offenders in Canada”

In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld changes to the Canadian Criminal Code that were intended to reduce the over-incarceration of Indigenous people in Canadian prisons.

Known as the “Gladue requirements” after the case R v. Gladue, they required courts to consider “the unique background and circumstances of Aboriginal people” in sentencing. But the requirements have been criticized as ineffective, as the number of Indigenous people behind bars has continued to rise.

“Today, the number of Indigenous people in federal prison is roughly five-times their population in Canada generally,” wrote Professor Dickson in a description of her project. “One in every three federally-sentenced woman is Indigenous…and 41% of all youth in custody admissions are Indigenous.”

Professor Dickson won a SSHRC Insight Grant worth $185,823 for a project that will address the lack of research into whether the Gladue requirements reduced sentencing disparities and Indigenous over-incarceration.

“There is little Canadian or international research supporting this assumption,” wrote Dr. Dickson. She and her co-applicant, Law and Legal Studies Professor Sebastian Malette will ask how the Gladue requirements actually influence judicial decisions, and how the requirements are supported across Canada.

“The findings of this project promise to empower the scholarly, policy and Indigenous communities with greater understanding of the role and the impact of Gladue,” she explains

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In the ‘2015 – 2016 Research and International Year in Review’, a publication released by the Office of the Vice-President (Research and International) this week, a section has been designated to spotlight research and funding highlights within the university. Prof. Dale Spencer is among those featured, and discusses his research projects in an article entitled, “Violence and Victimization: Police, Homelessness, Online Abuse and Indigenous Adoption”. As noted in the article, Prof. Spencer’s work delves into the experiences, effects of, and reactions to, manifold forms of violence and victimization.

To read the article and view the full document, please visit: 

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Congratulations to Prof. Adrian Smith, who was Co-Applicant on a team that has successfully secured a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, for a project entitled “Reconciling Sovereignties: New Techniques for ‘Authorizing’ Extraction On Indigenous Territories”. The multi-year project will receive $176,000. 

Prof. Smith also secured a second grant as Co-Investigator for a project entitled “Taking Ownership and Control of the Green Energy Economy,  from Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Respond to Climate Change”, a SSHRC Community-University Research Alliance (PI Carla Lipsig-Mumme), for 2016-17.

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