Professor Megan Gaucher and Professor Dale Spencer have each been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant for their respective research projects.
Mapping the Discursive and Institutional Landscape of ‘Birth Tourism’ and its Perceived Attack on Canadian Birthright Citizenship
Professor Megan Gaucher
Professor Megan Gaucher has been awarded a five-year $223,328 Insight Grant for her research project. Birth tourists – a term used to describe non-resident mothers who give birth on Canadian soil so that their child has a claim to Canadian birthright citizenship – are accused of undermining Canada’s jus soli citizenship laws and subsequently ‘queue jumpers’. While the practice of birth tourism is completely legal and statistically low, birth tourism continues to be identified as an issue in need of legislative remedy. Calls for legislative action however, remain reliant on an incomplete picture of the empirical dynamics of birth tourism. This project will provide the first comprehensive mapping of the state of birth tourism in Canada and will critically interrogate how multiple socio-legal spaces are used to both criminalize and restrict access to non-resident mothers and their future children. This study will explore how constructions of foreignness undermine the longstanding assumption that formal legal citizenship is an uncontested condition for membership to the Canadian state and explore how political and public discourse around birth tourism ultimately reproduces settler-colonial imaginaries of “good” familial citizens.
Read more about Professor Gaucher’s Insight Grant research project.
Probing the Registry: Police Management and Monitoring of the National Sex Offender Registry
Professor Dale Spencer
Professor Dale Spencer received a five-year $173,717 Insight Grant for his research project that focuses on the RCMP and municipal police officers managing the national sex offender registry to look at how the registry is used in Canada, how collaborations between the RCMP and other policing organizations are interpreted by officers and how the registry serves to manage persons convicted of sex offenses (PCSO) in the community. The project will involve focus groups with RCMP members in registry centres and interviews with officers in police organizations across Canada. Prof. Spencer says, “We’ll look at police culture, experiences and practices related to the management of the registry itself and the monitoring of those who are named.”
Read more about Professor Spencer’s Insight Grant research project.