Professor Lara Karaian receives SSHRC Insight Development Grant

Lara Karaian is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice with a cross-appointment to the Department of Law and Legal Studies. Dr. Karaian is the recipient of a two year SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2012-2014) for her project titled “Managing Risky Subjects: Teenage Girls, Digital Technology and Canadian Anti-Sexting Public Education Campaigns”.

Unlike in the US and Australia, Canada has yet to see a criminal law response to teenage sexting, despite the fact such a response is possible. In this context, Dr. Karaian’s research examines the extra- and quasi-legal responses to sexting, namely how crime prevention efforts—such as criminal diversion programs, online Internet Safety initiatives, and televise public service announcements (PSAs)—construct and propose to regulate teenage digital sexual expression.

Given that teenage girls’ sexting practices appear to drive these responses, Dr. Karaian asks: How do crime prevention efforts enact governmental rationalities and disciplinary power relations that produce sexting and sexters as objects of thought, thus further rendering them as sites of social and legal regulation? How do teenage girls’ racialized and classed sexual identities become invested with legal, cultural and political meaning in disputes about the “risks” of sexting? To what extent, if at all, do teenage girls’ sexual narratives inform these meaning making projects and shape emerging legal and cultural discourses about digital sexual expression rights? How does teenagers’ use of digital technology shift the boundaries of public/private, risk/opportunity, subject/object, and victim/perpetrator? And finally, how do teenage girls’ themselves understand their complex identities, the practice of sexting, and its/their regulation in a digital age?

In addition to her analysis of the representational and regulatory practices of extra- and quasi-legal institutions and organizations, Dr. Karaian will conduct cross-Canada focus groups with teenage girls on sexting, sexuality and the so-called ‘sexualization of culture’.

She can be reached at lara_karaian@carleton.ca or at (613) 520-2600 x 1458.