Doing Crime-Prevention, Doing Gender: Canadian Women’s Responses to Police-Produced Gendered Crime-Prevention Messaging

British Journal of Criminology (2023)

Drawing on focus group and interview data, this paper examines how race and social class intersect with gender to inform Canadian women’s responses to police-produced gendered crime-prevention messaging. I position women’s enactments of institutionally endorsed crime-prevention strategies as a resource for the successful achievement of femininity, and I consider how intersecting social statuses shape how women do crime-prevention. Focus group dialogue reveals three orientations to police crime-prevention messaging: resentment, pragmatism, and gratitude. Across orientations, women strategically enact state imperatives to meet their own agentic ends. By identifying crime-prevention as a resource for achieving femininity and highlighting racialised and classed dimensions in women’s gender performances, this research enriches extant literature on crime-prevention and femininities.

“This Isn’t Justice”: Abused Women Navigate Family Law in Greater Vancouver

Canadian Journal of Family Law (2023)

with Wendy Chan

With the implementation of the Family Law Act in 2013, the family legal system in British Columbia saw a series of progressive reforms. These include the recognition of emotional, psychological, and financial control as family violence, a new protection order process to replace the limited restraining orders formerly available to abuse victims, a mandate that courts consider how exposure to family violence impacts children, and minimum mandatory training standards for family dispute resolution professionals. While there has been a great deal of legal commentary on these new provisions, there is a paucity of scholarly research documenting the experiences of frontline workers who support abused women. We address this lacuna, drawing on in-depth interviews with family lawyers and frontline advocates who assist women exiting violent relationships in greater Vancouver. Our findings highlight the many challenges facing women in the family law system and suggest that the perceived unfairness many women experience is neither accidental nor uncommon. Rather, structural barriers to getting into the courtroom, in addition to widespread judicial ignorance about family law and family violence disadvantage women seeking just separations from abusive partners. To better meet the needs of abused women in greater Vancouver, increased funding for legal aid and support services, mandatory family violence training for judges making decisions on family files, and the transformation of victim-blaming attitudes within and beyond the courtroom are needed.

“There’s Girls Who Can Fight, and There’s Girls Who Are Innocent”: Gendered Safekeeping as Virtue Maintenance Work​

Violence Against Women (2022)

Women routinely practise taxing safety strategies in public, such as avoiding unlit spaces after dark. To date, scholars have understood these behaviors as means by which women bolster their physical safety in public. My in-depth interviews with women in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia suggest that, much less than reliably enhancing women’s safety, safety work often exacerbates women’s fear of violent crime and unreliably mitigates their exposure to violence. I thus interrogate the protective function of gendered safekeeping and reconceptualize women’s safety work as virtue maintenance work, theorizing that women practice risk-management in public places to attain the ontological security associated with evading subjectivities of gendered imprudence.

“You Gotta Be Able To Pay Your Own Way”: Canadian News Media Discourse and Young Adults’ Subjectivities of Successful Adulting

Canadian Journal of Sociology (2020)

with Barbara Mitchell

Youth transitions to adulthood and traditional markers of adulthood are becoming more fluid, uncertain, and extended in contemporary societies. Despite these shifts, public discourses surrounding young adult transitional trajectories are dominantly informed by a linear benchmark perspective. This framework positions establishing financial autonomy with the goal of permanently leaving the parental home as central to successful adulthood. In this paper, we integrate textual news media and interview data to critically interrogate contemporary public discourses of adulting in tandem with Canadian young adults’ subjective understandings of adulthood. We conduct Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) using two complementary data sources: (1) a selection of Canadian news media addressing youth transitions to adulthood (n = 44), and (2) interviews with Canadian young adults, assessing their perceptions and experiences of adulthood (n = 20). Our findings reveal that media and personalized constructions of successful adulthood are synonymous with financial independence and responsibility. These social norms reflect and shape young adults’ subjective meanings of adulthood and inform the ways of being that young people imagine as ideal.

“I’m Probably Just Gonna Skim”: An Assessment of Undergraduate Students’ Primary Scientific Literature Reading Approaches

International Journal of Science Education (2020)

with Kirk Hepburn, Emily Leaman, and Nienke Van Houten

We investigated undergraduate students’ approaches to reading primary scientific literature (PSL). Self-report surveys and think-aloud reading interviews were used to uncover students’ approaches to PSL with respect to evidence finding, prioritisation of paper sections, and reading skill in relation to task context. Self-report and observational interview data were also analysed to investigate the relationship between students’ self-reported and actual reading approaches. Our findings indicate that undergraduate students exhibit a spectrum of approaches to evidence finding, that many use pre-interpreted text to make meaning of PSL, and that student reading approaches are enhanced by task context. Data also indicate a misalignment between students’ self-reported and actual reading approaches, with students generally over-confident in their abilities. We interpret these findings using deep vs. surface learning criteria and the Structure Building Model (SBM) of reading comprehension. Our exploratory research extends the small body of literature on student PSL reading and indicates that more in-depth work needs to be done to support the development of educational interventions aimed at enhancing student reading approaches.  

To Whom Are We Accountable? The Vulnerability of Deep Listening in Feminist Ethnographic Research

Forthcoming in Contemporary Vulnerabilities: Reflections on Social Justice Methodologies (University of Alberta Press)

Edited by Claire Carter, Chelsea Temple Jones, and Caitlin Janzen

Academic norms encourage researchers to present themselves as in-control knowledge producers—even during the design phase of inquiry. These norms are at odds with inductive approaches in which research questions and foci are emergent. In this chapter, I discuss deep listening as a feminist method and praxis that eschews the easy mapping of qualitative data onto existing disciplinary frameworks. My discussion centers the vulnerability of deep listening as it manifests in the analysis phase of interview research, a time at which researchers’ face-to-face interactions with participants have typically ended, and accountability to interviewees begins to exist in tension with unsettling images of future readers and critics. I propose deconstructionist analysis as a practically useful strategy for listening deeply to interlocutors post-fieldwork, and in so doing, speaking back to the epistemic communities in which scholarly work is read and reviewed.