PhD Roundup | CrimSL News September 2021

A notebook, coffee, headphones and keyboard sit on a deskIt has been a big year for our PhD students! Here are some highlights from their accomplishments over the past eight months.

Awards

Congratulations to Jessica Bundy, Daniel Konikoff, and Kadija Lodge-Tulloch who have each been awarded an OGS for the 2021-2022 academic year!

And congratulations to Jamie Duncan who has been awarded a SSHRC CGS!

Fellowships and Appointments

Jacqueline Briggs has been awarded a two-year SSHRCC Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she will take up at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law in fall 2021. There she will conduct archival research and interviews on the history of government lawyers in the Department of Justice over the last 150 years. The postdoctoral project builds on her dissertation study of a legal aid program operated by the Department of Indian Affairs and the Department of Justice from the 1870s to 1970s. 

Erick Laming has begun an Assistant Professor position in Criminology in the Department of Sociology at Trent University.

Grace Tran began a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University’s Migrations Initiative on September 1st.

Grant Valentine has begun an appointment at the Okanagan College Department of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Publications

Duncan, J., & Walby, K. (2021). Police Union Political Communications in Canada. The British Journal of Criminology. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1093/bjc/azab043

  • The article examines the communications of two Canadian police associations in Toronto and Winnipeg. We describe how police unions tactically engage with multiple forms of media to disseminate strategic narratives that reflect police identity and ideology. We conceptualize the mobilization of ‘thin blue line’ narratives and maintenance of a ‘blue wall of silence’ as forms of boundary work, which serve to favourably delineate the role of police in their communities while sidestepping critical views.

Giancarlo Fiorella, Charlotte Godart, Nick Waters, Digital Integrity: Exploring Digital Evidence Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Strategies for Open Source Researchers, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2021;, mqab022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jicj/mqab022

Book review of Sarah Brayne’s Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing in the journal Surveillance & Society: https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/14718

Konikoff, D. (2021). Gatekeepers of toxicity: Reconceptualizing Twitter's abuse and hate speech policies. Policy Internet, 1– 20. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.265

  • This paper combines sociolegal studies and communication theory to unpack Twitter’s troublesome relationship to content moderation, and how their policies can be improved to more effectively govern hateful and abusive speech.

Luscombe, A., Dick, K. & Walby, K. Algorithmic thinking in the public interest: navigating technical, legal, and ethical hurdles to web scraping in the social sciences. Qual Quant (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01164-0  

  • This paper provides an overview of how web scraping works, how this method can support research in criminology and other social science disciplines/fields, gives researchers strategies for navigating technical, legal, and ethical hurdles when using web scraping, and finally provides readers with example web scraping software that they can use to learn the practice.

Alexander McClelland and Alex Luscombe (2021) Policing the Pandemic: Counter-mapping Policing Responses to COVID-19 across Canada - Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research (IJR), Pandemic Justice, Volume 10: Spring 2021. https://www.cijs.ca/volume-10

San, S., & Akca, D. (2021). How Turkey’s democratic backsliding compromises the international dimension of democratization. Digest of Middle East Studies, 30(1), 34-52. https://doi.org/10.1111/dome.12223

  • This study theorizes the reasons why Turkey transitioned into authoritarianism despite its extensive ties to the West, building on scholarly literature that discusses the role of international influences on democratization processes.

San, S., Bastug, M, F., & Basli, H. (2021). Crisis management in authoritarian regimes: A comparative study of COVID-19 responses in Turkey and Iran. Global Public Health, 16(4), 485-501. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2020.1867880 

  • This study investigated Turkey and Iran’s official responses to COVID-19 to further understand authoritarian reactions to large-scale crises and how distinctions between the actions taken by authoritarian regimes might impact crisis management in such contexts.

Onat, I., & San, S. (2021). Global displacement of ISIS activities and effectiveness of police arrests as a means of deterrence. In A. J. Goldstone, E. Alimi, S. Ozeren, & S. Cubukcu (Eds.), From territorial defeat to global ISIS: Lessons learned. IOS Press Publication, Amsterdam.

  • This study examines the Turkish government’s reliance on exclusionary policies to prevent further acts of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorism.

Serdar San (2021): Turkish spies are abducting Erdogan’s political opponents abroad, openDemocracy

  • Op-Ed in openDemocracy about Turkish security services' extraterritorial abductions of political dissidents.

Lori E. Ross, Andrea Sterling, Cheryl Dobinson, Carmen H. Logie, Sandra D’Souza (2021). "Access to sexual and reproductive health care among young adult sex workers in Toronto, Ontario: a mixed-methods study” Canadian Medical Association Journal, 9 (2) E482-E490; DOI: 10.9778/cmajo.20200049 https://www.cmajopen.ca/content/9/2/E482.short

  • This article is based on a mixed-methods study we conducted in partnership with Planned Parenthood Toronto and Maggie's Toronto Sex Workers' Action Project. This community based research project was guided by a Youth Advisory Committee made up of young adult sex workers and our community partners. We also looked at the ways in which criminalization and fear of criminalization impact sex workers' access to sexual and reproductive health care.  It was important to me that sex workers voices and lived experiences be centred in this project as sex workers know best what they need.  Barriers to accessing  health care and stigma in health care settings are major issues for sex workers and I hope that health care providers will take seriously the recommendations put forth in this piece.

Grace Tran (2021) “We’re dating after marriage”: transformative effects of performing intimacy in Vietnamese “marriage fraud” arrangements, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44:9, 1569-1588, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1881142

Grace K. Tran (forthcoming). “I’m Not a Bad Guy, I Swear”: Analyzing Emotion Work and Negotiations of Criminality and Masculinity in Vietnamese-Canadian Men’s Participation in ‘Fake Wedding’ Arrangements. In Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration: Constellations of Security, Citizenship, and Rights, Ed. Anne-Marie D’Aoust. Rutgers University Press 

Diego Tuesta, Rethinking Prosecutorial Discretion: Towards A Moral Cartography of Prosecutors, The British Journal of Criminology, 2021;, azab040, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azab040

  • Based on Diego’s Ericson Prize-winning paper, the article focuses on the case of Madre de Dios in Peru. Madre de Dios is a settlement in the Amazon “where artisanal small-scale gold mining and human trafficking for labor and sexual exploitation proliferate.” Diego explores “the repertoire of justificatory arguments that prosecutors invoke to explain why certain cases of human trafficking for sexual exploration are prosecuted and why others do not.”

Dikla Yogev (2021) Social capital transformation and social control: what can we learn from the changing style in communication between religious communities and the police during COVID-19, Policing and Society, DOI: 10.1080/10439463.2021.1965141

Next story: Our Newest Doctors

Previous story: Post-Pandemic Scenarios

Return to the CrimSL News September 2021 table of contents