Rethinking Policing, Penality and Pandemic

This group brings together established, junior and emerging scholars across academic institutions, communities, and areas of research and organizing. Members meet monthly to discuss and analyze scholarship, reports, and current events related to policing and penality. We also organize and host conversations with and between community organizers and activists, in the spirit of study that aims to cultivate relationships and solidarity through collective dialogue and learning. We share a sense of responsibility and commitment to pursue collective work oriented toward good relations with one another and with land, and to work creatively and compassionately with one another and more broadly, with Black, Indigenous, migrant, queer, racialized, trans, disabled, street-involved, and poor people’s communities in and around Toronto. We are also especially concerned about how policing in its many forms endangers the lives of these groups, and how we can contribute to the work of local organizers and learn from and with them. Key themes around which our study group works, include Community-university relations and the role of the university in society; notions of “pandemic,” “public health,” and the contexts and consequences of neoliberal capitalism; carceral logics, practices, and institutions, notions of safety (including on and around university campuses in Toronto); food sovereignty in and around Toronto; housing precarity and houselessness in and around Toronto.

Leads

  • rosalind hampton, OISE Social Justice Education
  • Vannina Sztainbok, Independent Researcher

Members

Faculty Members, University of Toronto

  • Leah Montange, Munk School, CSUS

Faculty Members outside University of Toronto

  • Katie Bannon, Centennial College

Graduate Students, University of Toronto

  • Elaine Cagulada, OISE Social Justice Education
  • Mushfika Chowdhury, OISE Applied Psychology & Human Development
  • Nat Karpovskaia, OISE Curriculum, Teaching & Learning

Community Members

  • Vanessa Henry, Community Youth Worker