Congratulations to Prof. Rebecca Bromwich, whose book Looking for Ashley: Re-Reading What the Smith Case Reveals about the Governance of Girls, Mothers, and Families in Canada (Demeter Press, 2015) has been selected as the Women’s and Gender Studies Association (WGSRF) Outstanding Scholarship Prize honorable mention!
The book originated as Prof. Bromwich’s PhD thesis, and was later published and awarded a Canadian Law and Society Association (CLSA) student essay prize. This honour from the WGSRF is a reflection of the interdisciplinary work produced by the department, with particular recognition of excellence in Prof. Bromwich’s book within the disciplines of sociolegal studies, law, and women’s and gender studies.
About the Book
The 2007 death by self-induced strangulation in prison of nineteen year old inmate Ashley Smith drew a great deal of public attention. The case gave rise to a shocking verdict of homicide in the 2013 inquest into the cause of her death. In this book, I inquire into questions about of what social problem or phenomenon Ashley Smith is a “case,” and what governmental work is done by prevalent constructions of her as an exemplar. This book performs a critical discourse analysis of figures of Ashley Smith that emerge in her case, looking at those representations as technologies of governance. It argues that the Smith case is read most accurately not as an isolated system failure but an extreme result of routine, everyday brutality, of a society and bureaucracies’ gradual necropolitical successes. It critically analyzes how representations of Ashley in the case leave intact, and even reinforce, logics and systems governing gender, motherhood, security, risk, race thinking and exclusion, in power and knowledge that make it predictable for similar deaths in prison to recur. It argues that, in the logics underlying constructions through which Ashley Smith was celebritized and sacralized, mothers’, girls’ and women’s subjectivities and agencies are made unknowable and even unthinkable while the racialized social boundaries of a white settler society are maintained. This book attempts to intervene in those logics to help make alternative outcomes possible and to take steps towards questioning the raced, classed and heteronormative boundaries of commonly assumed figures of the “noble victim”, “good girl” and “good mother” while supporting the agencies of adolescent girls in actively playing a part in the authoring of their lives.
About the WGSRF Outstanding Scholarship Prize
In 2002 the (then) CWSA/ACÉF introduced an annual book prize competition, awarded to a monograph published in the previous year, in either English or French, as selected by a committee of 3-5 members. In the years since implementing this award, between 8-18 books have been nominated each year. Nominations are solicited from both association members and from publishers. Award winners originally received a complimentary registration to the conference, a plaque, and a year’s subscription to Atlantis at the awards ceremony during the annual conference. Up to $1000.00 was available to defray travel expenses.
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