The Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto is pleased to invite graduate students to the 2026 Annual Graduate Student Conference! This year's theme is State Violence and the Governance of (Dis)Order.
This free, one-day conference will take place in person at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, Canadiana Gallery building, University of Toronto, 14 Queens Park Cres. W.
The event will feature more than 30 interdisciplinary presentations from students across Canada and around the world as well as a keynote speech TBC.
The 2026 Graduate Student Conference aims to explore how states produce, justify, and manage violence to achieve security and control. Importantly, the Conference will facilitate the critical examination of political, social, and historical mechanisms through which order is constructed and whose lives, movements, or claims are labelled (dis)orderly.
By bringing together attendees with diverse methods and perspectives, the Conference hopes to foster dialogue, challenge dominant narratives, and generate new insights into the relationships between those with and without power and explore the institutional practices that shape and justify state violence to maintain governance over those who challenge or threaten these systems of power.
The Conference is an excellent opportunity for PhD and advanced MA students to share research broadly related to this theme and receive feedback from their peers. The Conference Committee welcomes submissions from criminology, sociolegal studies, sociology, law, psychology, history, science and technology studies, anthropology, public policy, geography and related disciplines.
Call for submissions
The Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies is now accepting paper submissions from students across Canada and the United States for the 2026 Graduate Student Conference on March 26th, 2026. This year’s theme is State Violence and the Governance of (Dis)Order.
This one-day conference will take place in-person at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, located at Canadiana Gallery, 14 Queens Park Cres. W.
There is no fee to attend or present.
The call for submissions is now open! Applications should be submitted using the online form.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Theories of order and disorder, and how states define deviance and the legitimacy of state violence.
- Security as a technology of governance.
- Comparative histories of the policing of counterinsurgency across empires and postcolonial states.
- State formation and the institutionalization of violence in colonial and settler-colonial contexts.
- The expansion of carceral logics beyond the prison to control and manage problematic populations.
- Predictive policing of (dis)order and digital forms of surveillance.
- Militarization of police forces to control (dis)order.
- Racialized and gendered dimensions of state violence.
- State responses to protest, civil disobedience, and grassroots organizing.
- Citizenship stripping, deportability, and the governance of mobile populations.
- Discourses around immigration that produce (dis)orderly subjects.
Timeline
Submission deadline: December 29, 2025, 11:59 pm
Notification of selection: January 12, 2026
Conference date: March 26, 2026
Questions?
Please contact the 2025-2026 CrimSL Graduate Student Conference Committee at gradconf.crimsl@utoronto.ca with any questions.