Contributors

Laura Bisaillon is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. She studies the social organization of knowledge of lay versus expert ways of knowing about medical, legal, and administrative practices and their implications. She is the author of Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience (University of British Columbia Press, 2022). As the first-ever analysis of the medical, legal, and bureaucratic practices governing the Canadian immigration medical program, the book received awards from the Canadian Sociological Association and the Canadian Studies Network. In 2021, the University of Amsterdam hosted the world premiere of her film The Unmaking of Medical Inadmissibility (2020). The film’s festival debut was the 2022 Canadian Labour International Film Festival.

Sue Bradford has been a community activist most of her life, apart from ten years as a Green Member of Parliament (1999–2009). Her political and research work has been in welfare, jobs, housing, participatory adult education, and organizational development. She completed her PhD in 2014, under the mentorship of Professor Marilyn Waring of the Auckland University of Technology (AUT). “A Major Left Wing Think Tank in Aotearoa: An Impossible Dream or a Call to Action?” was its name, and Dr. Laura Bisaillon was the international external examiner. Bradford works for the community-based organization Kōtare Research and Education for Social Change in Aotearoa. She also undertakes doctoral supervisions at AUT’s Institute of Public Policy.

Aziz Choudry was a professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg. Before that, he was an associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University and a Canada Research Chair in Social Movement Learning and Knowledge Production. His books include Learning Activism: The IntellectualLife of Contemporary Social Movements (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and The University and Social Justice: Struggles across the Globe (Pluto, 2020).

Jean Louis Deveau is a political activist ethnographer. Starting in 2010, he used this method of investigation to help an anti-shale gas alliance consisting of twenty-nine community groups stop the development of shale gas mining in New Brunswick, where he lives. In 2015, he joined forces with traditional Wolastoqey Grand Chief Ron Tremblay to challenge the development of a snowmobile grooming hub in Wolastokuk (traditional homeland). This foray led to his discovery of a long-forgotten treaty promise made in 1725 by the British to Wolastoquyik. In 2021, he enrolled as a part-time student in a law school program, through which he will develop the skills to treat this historical amnesia.

Agnieszka Doll is an assistant professor at the Department of History and Sociology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan and a socio-legal scholar working at the intersection of mental health, law, regulations, and society. Between 2019 and 2022, she held postdoctoral fellowships at McGill University, Dalhousie University, and the University of Toronto. Drawing on her professional legal experience, her doctorate “Lawyering for the ‘Mad’: An Institutional Ethnography of Involuntary Admission to Psychiatric Facilities in Poland” examined the social organization of involuntary admission that results in silencing the voices of admittees and those advocating on their behalf. She is preparing a book manuscript based on this with the University of Toronto, Institutional Ethnography Series tentatively titled Unaccountable Legalities: Mental Health Law, Legal Aid Lawyering and Institutional Entanglements. She aims to make her work available to academics, professionals, activists, and people entangled in psychiatric and/or criminal systems.

Gary Kinsman is a queer liberation, anti-poverty, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist activist living on Indigenous land. He was involved in the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty and more recently in the AIDS Activist History Project, Anti-69, the No Pride in Policing Coalition, and Queers for Palestine. He is the author of The Regulation of Desire: Queer Histories, Queer Struggles, 3rd edition (Concordia University Press, 2024), co-author of The Canadian War on Queers (with Patrizia Gentile; University of British Columbia Press, 2010), and co-editor of We Still Demand! (University of British Columbia Press, 2017), Sociology for Changing the World (Fernwood, 2006), and Whose National Security? (Between the Lines, 2000). He lectures and writes on many topics including connections between AIDS activism and surviving the COVID-19 pandemic. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Laurentian University. His website is http://radicalnoise.ca.

Erin Sirett drew on her work with NGOs in several different contexts for her doctoral research in International and Cultural Studies in Education at McGill University. She is now a union negotiator with the Public Service Alliance of Canada. She works primarily in the university sector.

Kevin Walby is an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg. He is the co-author of Police Funding, Dark Money, and the Greedy Institution (Routledge, 2022). He is co-editor (with S. Pasternak and A. Stadnyk) of Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada (Between the Lines Press, 2022) and Changing of the Guards: Private Influences, Privatization, and Criminal Justice in Canada (University of British Columbia Press, 2022) with A. Luscombe. He is the director of the Centre for Access to Information and Justice. He is co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.

Shannon Walsh is a director and writer of multiple award-winning documentaries on topics ranging from labour rights to grief and climate change. Walsh’s films have been theatrically released and broadcast globally and screened in festivals such as Hot Docs, CPH:DOX, IDFA, Doc NYC, and many others. She is co-editor of Ties That Bind: Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa (Wits University Press, 2016) and In My Life: Stories of Young Activists in South Africa 2002–2022 (Jacana, 2022). She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the Canadian Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2023. In 2024, her book The Documentary Filmmaker’s Intuition was released by Routledge, and her feature doc Adrianne & the Castle premiered at SXSW. Walsh is associate professor at the University of British Columbia.

Megan Welsh Carroll is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs, where she teaches courses on research methods and data analysis for social scientists, as well as special topics courses on homelessness and racial and gender (in)justice. The main goal of her scholarship is to inform community-based responses to poverty and criminal-legal contact that are rooted in people’s wisdom about their own lives, needs, and humanity. Her current research focuses on the health and sanitation needs of people experiencing homelessness, the criminalization of poverty, and racialized policing. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Social Problems, Feminist Criminology, Police Quarterly, Journal of Health and Human Services Administration, Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, Qualitative Sociology, Journal of Criminal Justice Education, and Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.

A. J. Withers is a long-time anti-poverty organizer and adjunct faculty in critical disability studies at York University, Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the co-editor (with Chris Chapman) of A Violent History of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working (University of Toronto Press, 2019), Disability Politics and Theory (Fernwood, 2012), and stillmyrevolution.org. They are currently revising their dissertation—a PAE from the standpoint of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, which is the focus of their chapter in this collected volume—into a book.