Research Interests
My work to date has focused primarily on victims of crime. My SSHRC-funded doctoral research examined the families and loved ones of homicide victims in their complex encounters with the criminal justice system, mental health professionals, self-help and victims' organizations, as well as in their more informal dealings with family and community. Issues of gender, self, social reaction and agency emerged as significant in each of these contexts, raising important questions about coping with the victimization experience.
I also conducted SSHRC-funded postdoctoral research on the unofficial "victim assignment practices" of three public vs. private victim services in Nova Scotia. I noted that despite evident awareness of the potential for victim assistance programs to encourage a further sense of victimization, along with various internal policies to avoid this outcome, each program did, in various ways, encourage claims of further victimization. These findings lend credence to the questions of critical criminologists as to whether victims' interests are indeed being served by victim service programs.
This work, along with my ethnographic study of restorative justice sessions, my historical study of the genesis of the victims' right movement, and a critical, comparative study of the treatment of crime victims in developing countries, has recently culminated in the publication of my book: Canadian Victims of Crime: Critical Insights (Toronto: CSPI/Women's Press). Topics include: 1) the initial impacts of crime; 2) social dynamics encountered by victims in their families and informal social settings; 3) gender and coping attempts; 4) the criminal justice system; 5) encounters with victim service programs, support groups and shelters; 6) emotion and the rise of the victims' rights movement; 7) policy responses; 8) the interactional dynamics of restorative justice sessions; and 9) comparisons with the position of victims in developing countries. My book concludes with a chapter that considers the implications of this body of work for future research. Throughout, I critically consider the meanings that are presented - and that emerge - in various contexts experienced by victims of crime. The general thesis is that many victims – particularly victims of violent crime - are poorly understood, and that institutions and services set up to help them often have counterintuitive, even potentially harmful impacts, often representing more of an effort to make it appear something is being done than providing substantive programs.
I am currently moving my research and writing in several new directions - away from crime and violent victmization and towards the much broader area of "social deviance," what some even consider "tolerable differences." Thus, I am variously engaged in three ongoing projects:
First, I am in the middle of a SSHRC-funded study of the ritual construction of meaning and identity among contemporary Freemasons. Thus far, I have interviewed 118 Freemasons in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, published a theoretical chapter, presented several times at conferences (such as the recent International Conference on the History of Freemasonry), and submitted two papers to peer-reviewed journals for review. These include articles on: 1) the social construction of curiosity among candidates for initiation; and 2) Masons' symbolic reconstruction of the past. As my research progresses, I am planning a book that empirically considers, from a broad interactionist perspective, both the methods used by contemporary Freemasons to comprehend the complex, multifaceted symbolism in their ritual, as well as the current meanings they pragmatically apply to their lives in the radically changed social conditions of today's society.
Second, I am developing theory and research on what I call "illegitimate pain." My work articulates the wide theoretical significance of painful, embodied emotions that are, in actor's everyday social, institutional and structural contexts, simply inexpressible. This is shedding light on the emergence of social problems claims-makers, the formation and nuance of social conflict in relation to identity-based new social movements, and holds variable significance in relation to the sociologies of deviance, victimization, the body, sexuality, and health. First developing, then elaborating this concept with Dr. Ailsa Craig, I subsequently fleshed it out through a study of emotion and the punishment dynamics in a strict, religious boarding school. In the future, I plan to follow this up by pursuing funding for a study of intercultural/ interracial relationships in settings where at least one subcultural group disapproves. I suspect that, despite many in society's claims that we have largely moved beyond prejudice, relationships bridging such social contexts often provide an interesting, personal challenge to such background assumptions. I believe this is both a timely topic and an excellent site to pursue study of the emotions and claims of individuals "caught in the middle," those whose suffering may often be seen by significant others as not only illegitimate, but their own fault.
Finally, I plan, in the future, to get back to a book prospectus entitled "Renewing the Past: Ancestry and the Genealogical Imagination." This planned edited volume constitutes an attempt, for the first time, to bring together key sources and writers to consider the important - but much neglected - social issues surrounding ancestry in the contemporary world (e.g. immigration, Aboriginal land claims, etc).