Law and Legal Studies Research Spotlight
The Department of Law and Legal Studies’ Research Spotlight Series highlights our faculty members’ innovative research grants and projects.
In this inaugural post, we feature the research of Dale Spencer, Associate Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University. Dr. Spencer’s research on violence, victimization, the 60s scoop’ and settler colonial projects, and digital worlds and the young people who engage with them, is both innovative and responsive to the important and often under examined aspects of our history, daily life, and future possibilities.
Professor Dale Spencer
A Researcher on the Rise
Dale Spencer joined the Department in 2014 and is Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies. Spencer’s work is empirically grounded and theoretically rich and contributes to understandings of violence and victimization across numerous contexts.
As a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Spencer researched sexual victimization, including responses by non-governmental agencies and police. Since then, his focus has expanded beyond criminological concerns to include important contributions to social theory, qualitative methods, and explorations of violence and victimization in different contexts, including corrections, elderly care, forced adoption, and sport.
Spencer has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles including in journals such as the British Journal of Criminology, Body and Society, Theoretical Criminology, Punishment and Society, Journal of Youth Studies, and Ethnography. Spencer was awarded the Ontario Early Researcher Award (2017, $150,000), the Faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence award (2019, $15,000), and the Carleton Faculty Graduate Mentoring Award (2020).
Strongly committed to mentoring, supervising, and publishing with graduate students, Spencer has six ongoing funded projects including:
Policing Sex Crimes
This Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project explores police investigator attitudes and interpretations of sex crime survivors and the complex bureaucratic infrastructure that has formed in response to sex crime victims.
Spencer’s forthcoming book entitled Policing Sex Crimes (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) offers an overview of the affordances and difficulties of investigating and responding to sex crimes in contemporary digital society. With co-authors Rose Ricciardelli (Memorial University) and Department of Law and Legal Studies PhD graduate Alexa Dodge (Dalhousie University), he elucidates how victims are interpreted by police officers and the challenges they face achieving justice in the wake of sexual victimization. Policing Sex Crimes also probes thornier issues regarding sex crime investigations, such as how police investigators’ experiences of watching cases flounder in court can lead to a cynicism that impacts their judgement of the viability of sexual assault cases.
Pekiwewin, Coming Home (aka the 60s Scoop project)
Spencer is a co-investigator (with principal investigator Raven Sinclair, University of Regina) on the SSHRC funded Pekiwewin project, which examines the period between 1950 and 1985, now referred to as the “60s scoop”, during which no less than 20,000 Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes across Canada as a part of a broader settler colonial project.
This study consists of two subprojects, archival/document research and a qualitative matrix, designed to unearth the architecture of the Indigenous Welfare era and reveal the nature of how obscure and questionable policies were reified, and subsequently inscribed, into the culture and practice of Indigenous Child Welfare.
Digital Worlds and Young People
Funded through his Ontario Early Researcher Award, this project seeks to fill knowledge gaps both within Canada and beyond regarding youth and the impact of the digital worlds with which they engage.
This mixed methods research project is committed to listening to the viewpoints and perspectives of young people and using those perspectives to analyze how digital worlds foster and aid in youth’s development of their identities and senses of belonging, as well as their experiences of loneliness and friendship online. Alongside Department of Law and Legal Studies PhD student Jean Ketterling and Department of Law and Legal Studies PhD graduate, Daniella Bendo (King’s UW), Spencer is writing a book manuscript on youth experiences of digital artifacts and the plethora of online platforms that they utilize.
More about Dale Spencer
You can find out more about Dr. Dale Spencer’s research, publications and more on his Faculty Profile page.