The Department of Law and Legal Studies is proud to celebrate the journeys and successes of this years’ cohort of students graduating with a MA in Legal Studies or PhD in Legal Studies. Please find research highlights for some of our recent graduates below. We wish them all the best in their future endeavors. Congratulations class of 2021!

Kimiya Missaghi

Missaghi received a Research Impact Canada’s 2021 Engaged Scholarship Award (April 2021) for her thesis research and earned her Master of Arts in Legal Studies in November 2021. Her thesis entitled “Redefining Resiliency, Resistance, and Oppression: A Case Study of the Underground University in Iran” involved interviewing alumni of the Baha’Ă­ underground university in Iran who attended such an institution due to the marginalization and violence they faced because of their religious identity. Her thesis research examined resiliency as a socially embedded process, an institutional model of resiliency, and resiliency in the context of intergenerational oppression and violence.

Missaghi looks forward to building on her research in advancing discourses on resiliency within intergenerational and intersectional processes, both theoretically and practically. She continues to work under the supervision of her thesis advisor Dr. Melanie Adrian, Department of Law and Legal Studies, examining religious freedom and specifically Islamophobia among youth in Canada.

Congratulations Kimiya!

Tessa Penich

Penich graduated with a Masters of Arts in Legal Studies in November 2021. During her degree, she received the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s, Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Chet Mitchell Memorial Award in Law. Her thesis research, titled “Dystopian Panic, Transphobic Hatred, and Annihilation Anxiety: Critiquing Radical Feminist Opposition to Sex Robots,” examines the ideological assumptions that underpin anti-sex robot arguments. Focusing on the Campaign Against Sex Robots, she uses a feminist critical discourse analysis and theoretical frameworks including sex-positive feminism, queer theory, and posthumanism to examine how and why these radical feminists have latched on to sex robot technology as a site of danger and violence against women. Her analysis finds that while anti-sex robot feminists claim to oppose systemic violence, their arguments reveal a deep investment in violence, particularly against trans women, in the name of protecting a narrowly defined ideal of womanhood and intimacy.

Penich chose the MA Legal Studies program at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ specifically to work with her supervisor, Dr. Ummni Khan, Department of Law and Legal Studies. She is grateful for the mentorship and support she has received from her thesis committee.

After completing her degree, Penich returned to her home province of Alberta and is currently working for the Alberta Living Wage Network. She is pursuing a career in research and policy and is in the process of publishing her thesis findings. A PhD is likely in her future.

Congratulations Tessa!

Dr. Jay Ramasubramanyam

Dr. Ramasubramanyam is a global south migration researcher. He completed his doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Dr. Betina Appel Kuzmarov, Department of Law and Legal Studies, and earned a PhD in Legal Studies in November 2021. His project was a study of some of the gaps associated with the global refugee regime and the historical development of refugee protection India. The project identified India as an alternate location of practice with respect to refugee protection. His research also studied the notion of ‘resistance’ with respect to India’s relationship to international refugee law mechanisms by pitting it against the existing global narrative of ‘deviance’ that has often been attached to states that are non-signatories of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. With the help of this study, his project presented first steps towards a new place for discourse on forced migration research.

Dr. Ramasubramanyam is an Assistant Professor at York University’s Law and Society Program. He is currently working towards turning his doctoral dissertation into a monograph, and two journal articles in the Journal of Immigrant and Refugees Studies, and the Journal of Refugee Studies.

Dr. Ramasubramanyam noted that “My time is ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ was memorable for many reasons. I came to Canada as an international student. Beyond my academic work I took the opportunity to engage with campus life at large through student advocacy and community engagement.”

Congratulations Dr. Ramasubramanyam!

Dr. Marcus Sibley

Dr. Sibley earned a PhD in Legal Studies in November 2021. His doctoral research historicizes and critically examines the idea and concept of “rape culture,” how it shapes and is shaped by knowledge practices related to sexual violence, and its role in political discourse and legal governance. He maps how the concept is constituted through epistemologies of radical feminist theory, social psychology, and criminology as an empirical measure of attitudes and orientations towards sexual violence. Considering this important historical context, his work also explores the implementation of Bill 132—the Ontario government’s response to addressing rape culture on university campuses—through efforts to reform post-secondary institutions into quasi-legal assemblages that intersect with broader systems of power, governance, and criminalization.

Dr. Sibley’s research was supported by the critical training offered by his supervisors, Dr. Dawn Moore and Dr. Dale Spencer of the Department of Law and Legal Studies, who ensured that his theoretical and substantive contributions were both engaging and rigorous.

Dr. Sibley currently holds a position as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University (Brantford). He is working on an important project titled “From NIMBY to neighbour: Brokering a dialogue about homelessness among people experiencing homelessness, law enforcement, and the community at large,” which investigates perceptions of homelessness by community stakeholders, police, and those with lived experience of housing precarity. He is excited to continue researching the governance of sexual violence, policing, and the criminalization of vulnerable and marginalized communities.

Congratulations Dr. Sibley!

The post Graduate Student Research Spotlight appeared first on Department of Law and Legal Studies.

The Department of Law and Legal Studies is proud of all of our graduate students. We would like to take this opportunity to highlight the research of some of our recent graduates as we wish them all the best in their future endeavors. Congratulations class of 2021!

Robyn O’Loughlin, PhD

Robyn O’Loughlin is graduating this week with her PhD studies in Legal Studies. Her research analyzed teacher attitudes about bullying and whether the Ontario government’s anti-bullying framework may contribute to racism towards indigenous students in Northern Ontario. Supervisor, Professor Vincent Kazmierski, states: “Robyn’s research provides important insight into the ways in which main-stream conceptions of “bullying” that are reinforced through government anti-bullying frameworks may be reinforcing colonial education practices to the ongoing disadvantage of Indigenous students.”

Robyn will continue her research as a postdoctoral fellow at  at Lakehead University, funding by a MITACS Elevate PostDoctoral Fellowship.

Congratulations Dr. Robyn O’Loughlin!

Monisha Logan, MA

Monisha Logan received a Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement along with her Master of Arts in Legal Studies degree. Her research is entitled “Digitally Witnessing Police Brutality: Examining the Relationship Between Police Violence, Race, and Affect in the Age of Social Media”. Her research focused on how a victim’s race influences how we as spectators view, listen, and react to their deaths online, and how that, in turn, may influence how we understand the larger issue of police violence. She approached her research by conducting a comparative analysis of social media comments that were left on two racially different cases of police brutality in the United States to see how these reactions were similar and/or differed.

Monisha will build on her MA research and continue to explore issues centered around racial justice and policing in her PhD in Legal Studies at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ this fall.

Congratulations Monisha! We look forward to seeing what you will achieve in your PhD research.

 Sylva Sheridan, MA

graduated with his Bachelor of Arts major in Law in 2019 and continued with his MA studies with us. His thesis is entitled “A Significant Negative Impact: Assessing the Link Between Historical Trauma, Indigenous Child Removal Policies, and the Disproportionate Number of Indigenous Children in the Child Welfare System”. His research area explored the intergenerational effects of the residential school system through assessing historical trauma theory in application to the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the child welfare system. He considered necropolitical forms of governance to examine Indigenous child removal policies. Sylva selected our MA program to complete his graduate work due to the interdisciplinary nature of the Department of Law and Legal Studies. He is grateful to have had the opportunity to work under the supervision of Dr. Jane Dickson.

Sylva is actively pursuing a career in public policy. He plans to publish and continue his research, with plans to pursue a PhD in the future. In his spare time, he spends time at his family cottage in Blue Sea, QC and is also writing a novel.

Congratulations Sylva! Enjoy your break, you deserve it.

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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 post, we feature the research of Megan Gaucher, Associate Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University. Dr. Gaucher’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections between citizenship, family, and belonging in Canadian immigration and refugee law, policy, and politics.

A Researcher is Born

At their 2018 Party convention in Halifax, the Conservative Party of Canada – in an effort to take a stand against birth tourism – narrowly passed a non-binding resolution to refuse automatic citizenship to children born on Canadian soil unless one of the parents is a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.  While acquiring jus solis citizenship is completely legal and the actual practice of birth tourism is statistically low, non-resident mothers accused of engaging in birth tourism are framed as “queue jumpers” taking advantage of Canadian generosity and undermining the value of Canadian birthright citizenship. Such calls to restrict or eliminate birthright citizenship, however, rest on very little empirical information about the prevalence and dynamics of birth tourism in Canada. Who is the birth tourist? How prevalent is birth tourism? What are the motivations for engaging in birth tourism? And most importantly, how is the practice of birth tourism (both perceived and actual) implicated within broader conversations about borders, citizenship and the Canadian family?

It is questions like these that drive associate professor Megan Gaucher’s work. A political scientist by training, her interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary debates in Canadian immigration and refugee law, policy and politics, specifically the intersections between family, citizenship and security. She studies the state’s role in familial formation and the regulation of intimate relationships in the name of border control; the operationalization of heteropatriarchal, racialized, settler-colonial narratives of family to police migrants and reinforce Canada’s physical and ideological borders; and the ways in which citizens, partial citizens, and non-citizens negotiate these parameters.

A Family Matter

Her book A Family Matter: Citizenship, Conjugal Relationships and Canadian Immigration Policy (UBC Press, 2018) documents the inconsistent treatment of conjugality in Canadian immigration policy and politics, contending that changes to family reunification programs are driven primarily by family form, not by family function. As a result, the provision of entry is pre-determined by state conceptions of family, care and interdependency aimed at preserving a specific conceptualization of family “fit” for Canadian citizenship. A Family Matter was shortlisted for the 2018 Donald Smiley Prize (CPSA) and received Honourable Mention for the 2020 Seymour Martin Lipset Prize (APSA). Gaucher has also published articles in Canadian Journal of Political Science, Canadian Ethnic Studies, International Journal of Canadian Studies and Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, among others.

Current Research

In addition to her Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded research on birth tourism, Gaucher is currently working on two other major research projects. The first project is a SSHRC-funded examination of migrant workers’ experiences with Canada’s family reunification process, focusing specifically on how familial bonds are evaluated in Canadian jurisprudence. “Current conceptualizations of care used by legislative and quasi-legislative bodies to evaluate family reunification claims,” Gaucher explains, “fail to account for the complex transnational and often non-linear realities of care embodied by migrant workers and their families.” The second project maps socio-legal constructions of single male migrants throughout Canada’s immigration history, exploring how gendered and racialized narratives of belonging frame the single male migrant as someone that is both celebrated and feared.

For Gaucher, her interdisciplinary and collaborative research agenda is undoubtedly inspired by her surroundings – “I feel incredibly lucky to be doing this work in a department and faculty that fosters cross-disciplinary networks, surrounded by colleagues who are constantly exposing me to new and exciting areas of socio-legal research, and with amazing graduate students who are bringing their knowledge and enthusiasm to every single project.”

More about Megan Gaucher

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

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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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