Madalena Santos

Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream

• Ph.D. (Sociology), Carleton University
• Email Madalena Santos

Areas of Interest

• Settler colonial studies
• Anticolonial resistance and resurgence
• Mobility and migration
• State crime
• Critical criminology

About

Madalena Santos is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at Carleton’s Institute for Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ). She has a PhD in Sociology from Carleton University. She has a broad interest penal abolition, social justice and settler colonial studies.

Madalena’s most recent work with Dr. Augustine S.J. Park offers a victim-centric analysis of reparations relating to apartheid in South Africa. We identify a multi-dimensional ‘reparations gap’, which refers to the disconnect between victims and the state in relation to reparations, including the meanings attributed to reparations, and the perception, evaluation, and experience of reparations. The reparations gap has had profoundly ‘counter-reparative’ impacts on the relationship between victims and the government. Appreciating victims as reparations ‘experts’ with unique knowledge rooted in lived experience, this article explores their narratives of the ongoing need for reparations, specifically relating to a nexus of historically induced structural and systemic injustice. The article calls for the comprehensive and continuous participation of victims and their organizations to close the reparations gap.

Teaching

Madalena is an Assistant Professor in the teaching stream at Carleton’s Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ). Her courses explore historical and contemporary criminalization, and processes and practices of surveillance, policing and security governance, especially as these processes intersect with social categories of race, class, and gender. Madalena combines elements of theory and practice through experiential learning activities to offer students the opportunity to employ what they learn about in class to their studies and everyday lives.

Research

Her program of research includes the study and practice of intersectional approaches to justice in settler colonial states. She has published on Palestinian solidarity and resistance to settler colonialism as well as on the criminalization of social media activism. Her most recent research with Dr. Augustine Park from the Department of Sociology at Carleton took a victim-centred approach to understanding reparations by actively including the voices of South African apartheid victims and recognizing victims as experts in their own lives.

She is presently conducting research in three separate but related areas: state crime, the targeting and killing of journalists as well as the criminalization of protest speech and expression. Through this study, she seeks to examine the relationship between distinctive state actors in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. She plans to integrate her research into ICCJ course work, teaching, and student opportunities.

Courses

CRCJ 4001: Special Topics – The Criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and Women of Colour

CRCJ 4001: Special Topics – Crime, Mobility, and Migration (previously, the Criminalization of Im/migration)

CRCJ 3201: Special Topics – Contemporary Representations of Punishment

CRCJ 3002: Qualitative Research Methods

CRCJ 2100: Criminological Theories

CRCJ 1000: Introduction to Criminology and Criminal Justice

Current Academic Appointments

Instructor II, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University.

Publications

Park, Augustine S. J., and Madalena Santos (2022). “The Counter-reparative Impacts of South Africa’s Reparations Gap: Victims as Reparations ‘experts’ and the Role of Victims’ Organizations.” Journal of Law and Society, 49(4): 635-657.

Monaghan, Jeffrey and Madalena Santos (2020). “Canada, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Flexibility of Terror Identities.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, 13(2): 280-295.

Santos, Madalena (2018). “Palestinian Narratives of Resistance: The Freedom Theatre’s Challenge to Israeli Settler Colonization.” Settler Colonial Studies, 8(1): 96-113.

Santos, Madalena (2018). “Settler Colonial Surveillance and the Criminalization of Social Media: Contradictory Implications for Palestinian resistance” in Lucas Melgaço and Jeffrey Monaghan (eds.) Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital Practices and Surveillance, Routledge: New York, Chapter  5, pp. 97-114.

Santos, Madalena (2013). “Relations of Ruling in the Colonial Present: An Intersectional View of the Israeli Imaginary.” Canadian Journal of Sociology/ Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 38(4): 509-532.

Santos, Madalena (2011). “Beyond Negotiating Impossibilities: The Art of Palestinian Creative Resistance.” Platforum, 12: 57-79.