Research Projects
Indigenous Justice Research:
Prison Programming & Community Re-entry Experiences
I work as part of a larger team called the University of Alberta Prison Project. Since 2016, we have interviewed over 2000 incarcerated people about their experiences inside and leaving prison. My research centres on the experiences of our Indigenous participants, who make up roughly half of our interviewees. My research approach mixes Western-style qualitative methods with Indigenous research methods, centring participants’ knowledge and local Indigenous advocacy. I also aim to produce research with concrete outcomes. Much of my work responds directly to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. I am also working with Elders, Indigenous researchers, and prison staff to develop community-based cultural supports for system involved people.
Current study: community re-entry experiences (2022-2028)
Our current study, led by Dr. Sandra Bucerius, involves a randomized sample of 33% of the currently incarcerated people in Alberta’s provincial prison population (approximately 1250 people). Roughly 60% of our participants identify as Indigenous.
Using a mixed-methods, longitudinal design, we examine barriers to reintegration and the factors that support successful re-entry, as defined by participants themselves. We interview participants upon release and follow them over their first year after leaving prison (2 weeks, 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, and 12 months post-release).
Despite the importance of community re-entry in Canada, we lack systematic, context-specific evidence for how people experience it. Most existing research comes from the United States and Europe, which does not translate easily to the Canadian context - especially for Indigenous peoples. This study addresses that gap by examining how factors such as housing, employment, social connections, and health shape re-entry experiences. By tracking how expectations at release align with lived experiences over time, this project generates the first large-scale, longitudinal evidence on re-entry experiences in Canada.
Because of its large, randomized sample, we are hopeful this study will inform re-entry policy and improve supports for people leaving prison in Canada. This research is in progress and please get in touch if you are interested in this work or want to learn more. This project is supported by a SSRHC Partnership Grant.
Indigenized prison programming research (2016-2023)
Since the 1970s, Canadian prisons have introduced “Indigenized” programming and resources, such as courses teaching Indigenous cultures and colonial history, Elder visits, ceremony in prison, and “healing lodges,” which are specialized prisons informed by aspects of Indigenous cultures and traditions.
I have published two papers in Crime and Justiceand Incarceration exploring Indigenized prison programs and what it means to “decolonize” prisons. While the prison is a colonial institution, I challenge prominent scholars who argue that Indigenized programming is a genocidal practice comparable to residential schools. These scholars, I contend, privilege academic theory over diverse Indigenous knowledges, such as the perspectives of Indigenous peoples affected by incarceration, as well as explicit recommendations by the Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood Movements, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
I show how Indigenized programming emerged out of Indigenous and prisoner-led resistance to Canada’s prison system, and, based on interviews with hundreds of incarcerated people, how these programs can help empower system-involved people. I argue that while efforts to Indigenize prisons are inevitably flawed and partial, such efforts represent ongoing resistance to Canada’s colonial justice system. For a short summary of this work, click here.
Social Movements and Political Extremism Research
My second research area centres on social movements, populism, and extremism, focusing on right-wing nationalism and far-right politics. Much of my work on these topics is a methodological critique of "far-right studies," a field often dominated by counter-terrorism experts and liberal political science frameworks. Using ethnographic methods including participant observation and in-depth interviews, I take a sociological and social movement studies approach that complicates how we conceptualize rightist politics. Rather than reducing right-wing movements to isolated "extremist" threats or fringe ideologies, I show how such politics are often embedded within and enabled by the liberal-democratic status quo.
Current study: German populism and the AfD (2025-2027)
Working with Dr. Sandra Bucerius, this project seeks to understand why Germans are increasingly disillusioned with “establishment” politics and what draws people to populist parties such as the AfD and BSW. We are conducting 50 in-depth interviews with AfD and BSW supporters in West Germany (subject to change). This research is supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.
Dissertation research: the Canadian nationalist movement (2016-2025)
My PhD dissertation is a semi-ethnographic study of Canada’s right-wing nationalist movement. Using a critical theory and social movement studies perspective, I interviewed 42 current leaders and members of on-the-ground nationalist groups and conducted over 40 hours of participant-observation at 20 rightist political rallies from 2016-2020.
This “up-close” research challenges dominant scholarship that reduces right-wing nationalism to a security threat or treats such politics as separate from Canadian political culture. Instead, I situate these movements within broader cultural and political dynamics, showing how they operate in continuity with, rather than in opposition to, the existing political order.
I have developed these arguments across several publications. In the British Journal of Criminology, I critique security-oriented frameworks that often reduce right-wing nationalism to a fringe crime problem. In Current Sociology, I challenge the use of “hate” as an analytic category in far-right studies, showing how it reduces politics to individual attitudes and emotions, distracting from the structural forces sustaining far-right movements. In Social Forces, I challenge dominant claims that far-right politics are inherently “illiberal,” showing how participants mobilize liberal chauvinism to gain power. I demonstrate how far-right movements can be enabled by liberalism, rather than being external threats to it.
I have also lent my expertise on extremism to Drs. Urbanik (Alberta), Maier (Winnipeg), and Greene (Athabasca) for a co-authored piece published in the British Journal of Criminology. Using a case study of attacks against unhoused Indigenous peoples in Lethbridge, Alberta, we argue that hate crime scholarship requires closer engagement with class dynamics and intersectionality.
My dissertation work was supported by a SSHRC doctoral fellowship and the Dr. Gordon Hirabayashi Graduate Scholarship in Sociology.