Events

A celebration for the new 4th volume of the Crime and Ethos: Carleton Undergraduate Criminology Journal

How much time and effort has Canada spent spying on Indigenous activists? In 2022, Brett Forester of CBC Indigenous in Ottawa set out to answer that question. It proved easy enough to ask but nearly impossible to answer. It took three years, four formal access to information requests, one informal request, three complaints to the federal information commissioner and one court challenge, but after all this wrangling we can begin to confirm the long-suspected truth: Snooping on Indigenous peoples has been a priority for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service almost since its inception.

After reviewing more than 1,000 pages of declassified documents, Forester found surveillance that began in Labrador in 1988 with Cold War paranoia about Soviet meddling had by 1998 evolved into a national counterterrorism project monitoring Indigenous dissent as a form of domestic extremism. In this talk, Forester will explain why and how this came to be, as he offers a behind-the-scenes look at his investigation into more than a decade of CSIS’s self-styled “Native extremism” operations.

This talk, featuring Dr. Leon Laidlaw, shares lessons learned from grassroots abolitionist organizing and indigenous community safety patrols in Winnipeg as a white settler trans person interested in understanding decolonizing approaches to gender justice.

Deaths in Ontario jails have been increasing, yet there has been little institutional action to make change. Come and hear from those in the movement who are working to mobilize strategies for greater transparency and accountability to end deaths in custody.

The Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) celebrates 25 years of the BA programs in Criminology and our Institute a festive sit-down brunch, during which we will screen a short video about the evolution of our InstituteWe also showcase a humble oral history of the ICCJ, featuring interviews with alumni, current students, cross-appointed faculty members, as well as former ICCJ Directors.

This is a dual presentation that will address the subjects of restorative justice and UN policies in the context of Brazil, presented by Helena Wilke, as well as the topics of radicalization, CVE (countering violent extremism), and ethnography in Canada, which will be discussed by Kristopher Millet.

Reflecting on their decades of experience resisting the Canadian state and prison system, Twins, Dumont, and Stirrett explore the intersections between carceral dispossession and the life giving strategies of Indigenous peoples, including artistic, grass roots, and legal modes of resistance.

This talk presents research that examines the interactive effects of defendant race and expert testimony on White jurors’ perceptions of recanted confessions. Preliminary results suggest evidence of a watchdog effect with American, but not Canadian, White mock jurors. 

This talk adopts a critical geographic perspective on the relationship between space and event to discuss the proliferation of police liaison strategies and to examine the ways in which PLTs territorialize settler state power and subtly reconfigure the political terrain over which political dissent is organized. 

This talk examined Mexico City police’s struggle to find the person responsible for the deaths of forty elderly women, many of whom had been strangled in their homes with a stethoscope by someone posing as a government nurse.

This talk examined public debates over sexualized surveillance, crime, pleasure, and sexual exploration. It took place in-person and featured a Postdoctoral Fellow with ICCJ.

Racial violence embedded in carceral and policing institutions has emerged as a topic of renewed focus. What responsibilities does the University have in supporting calls to disband and/or defund policing and carceral institutions? What role does or should criminology play in challenging racialized violence relating to decarceral, anti-racist, decolonial initiatives? How should University institutions support decarceral, anti-racist, decolonial initiatives? 

Featuring renowned Indigenous Academic and Activist Pam Palmater and Criminologist Michelle Brown

An iteration of the ICCJ Colloquium series organized in collaboration with the Departments of Law and Legal Studies Communication and Media Studies.

Dr. Ivan Zinger, Correctional Investigator of Canada

Dr. Zinger will present on the topic of Human Rights, Mental Health and Federal Corrections. In his discussion, he will discuss the high prevalence rates of mental health disorders among the federal inmate population, the criminalization of the mentally ill, the differential correctional outcomes for those with a mental disorder and the reforms that are necessary to move toward a more humane approach for managing the mentally ill behind bars.

Fall colloquium of the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) in conjunction with the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project (CPEP), the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Department of Law and Legal Studies, and the Faculty of Public Affairs.

Dr. Willem de Lint

Amongst governments, there is a growingimg interest in hybrid threats. Adopted from military discourse (hybrid war), a hybrid threat discourse pushes civil society issues including public order, crime control and civic participation under a military/national security template. In this paper I explore security ordering through hybrid threat representations based primarily on a critical political reading of the reports, strategic analysis and working papers of the European Centre for Countering Hybrid Threats (HybridCoE). In this, I am concerned with what I refer to as dark disorder. I ask the question, are attributions of the strength, vitality, scale, and suitability of targets made by agents under the auspices of hybrid threat centres designations that as much discover as project dark disorder? I argue that a more nuanced understand-ing of hybrid threat may be found by situating analysis within a critical societal security discourse.

Derek Twyman, a Canadian citizen, was 25 years-old when he was sentenced to 160 years in a North Carolina prison after being convicted of a string of non-violent burglaries in 1989. In November 2017, Twyman finally returned to Canada as a free man after more than 27 years behind bars. Twyman was freed thanks to a group of Canadian lawyers who spent a decade fighting against Twyman’s excessively harsh sentence. This event features Derek Twyman and his Toronto-based lawyer Shane Martinez. They will discuss the case, experiences in prison, the challenges of reintegration, and similar challenges faced by hundreds of Canadian citizens that are stuck in prisons abroad.

Fall colloquium of the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice in conjunction with the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project (CPEP), the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Department of Law and Legal Studies, and the Faculty of Public Affairs.

Featuring Travis Linnemann and Marilou Gagnon.

Co-sponsored by the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Department of Law and Legal Studies.

David Moffette, Assistant Professor, University of Ottawa, Department of Criminology

During the spree of racist attacks that followed the election of Trump – and that reached Ottawa – many framed the moment as a break with normal liberal politics. But what is old and new about this violence? And what is the effect of securitizing discourses in shifting how some issues are governed? Summarizing an argument developed with Shaira Vadasaria, Professor Moffette will bring a critical race analysis to existing literature on securitization to engage with these questions. The presentation will address a lacuna in securitization theory and offer a conceptual framework to account for the entanglements between the securitization of immigration and racial violence. Reflecting on the limits of the concept of securitization to account for the normality of racial violence, the presentation will address the framework of racial governmentality and suggest that securitization enables expressions of racial desires already constitutive of colonial modernity. Empirical vignettes will be used to illustrate the argument.