Jennifer M Kilty
Biographic Data
| ID | 230672 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer M Kilty |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer M |
| FAMILY NAME | Kilty |
| SIGNATURE | KILTY J M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Ottawa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2914-7968 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Feeling the Carceral
It’s like you’re still in jail’
It's an awful thing, but it's better than being dead’
Prison authorities around the world are increasingly adopting more politically palatable alternatives to segregation – often referred to as solitary confinement. In 2019, the Canadian government enacted Bill C-83, legally abolishing segregation in federal prisons – at least, on paper – and established Structured Intervention Units (SIUs) as a supposedly less harmful alternative. Critics have problematized the Correctional Service of Canada's impl…
A Right to Know? Using Access to Information as Method in Critical Criminological Research
Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) requests are becoming an increasingly common method of qualitative inquiry, particularly for critical criminologists in Canada who face barriers in accessing Canadian prisons to conduct research. This article explores the politics of institutional gatekeeping and highlights the ongoing policing of critical criminological knowledge, necessitating the use of ATIP as a data collection method. Two case studies…
Walking an EmotionalTightrope
This article examines the role of solidarity as a centrally distinguishing feature of two distinct emotion culture(s) operating in federal prisons for women in Canada. We explore the social interactions between correctional officers and inmates and among criminalized women to understand how group cohesion is shaped by the power dynamics between these groups in the prison environment. For correctional officers, solidarity facilitates difficult asp…
It is just so emotionally and mentally consuming to be a community organizer”
Social justice activism can be an emotional enterprise. While many people become involved due to feelings of anger and frustration about a particular unjust socio-political issue, we contend that these feelings exist in tandem with those of love and care for others (or for a specific community of belonging) and that it is this combination of emotions that helps sustain the desire to work toward positive or transformative social change. We mobiliz…
Playing “mental judo”
Prisons are inherently emotional environments where both staff and prisoners engage in a continuous process of emotion management while working and living in carceral spaces. This paper explores how Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) values and norms shape how predominantly nonuniformed staff manage compassion inside the prison environment. This includes when and to whom they are allowed to express compassion, when they need to hide or suppress…
Criminal Code reform of HIV non-disclosure is urgently needed
Emotions and anti-carceral advocacy in Canada
Over the past three decades, Canada has expanded its capacity to confine citizens in ways that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities and people grappling with mental health and substance use issues, as well as poverty and homelessness. Carceral expansion, however, is not restricted to increasing institutional capacity; it also entails mechanisms to govern vulnerable people through the broader communi…
Slow violence and the coloniality of carceral foodways in Canadian federal prisons
The disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous peoples continues to be a disturbing trend in Canada, prompting calls to problematize prison as a modern manifestation of settler-colonialism. To address this call, we explore the disconcerting similarities between historical accounts of food insecurity endured by Indigenous children in residential schools and our participants’ shocking food experiences in Canadian federal prisons. Using qualitativ…
Emotions and Carceral Spaces
The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) invites submissions for a special issue on the theme of "Emotions and Carceral Spaces".Experiences of imprisonment or living and working in various carceral settings are isolating, punitive, and at times traumatic, all of which infl uence the emotional experiences of both prisoners and staff .Carceral spaces are neither uniform nor orderly, and the way emotions are felt and expressed diff ers signifi cant…
Emotions in Pedagogical Practice
Emotions and relationality can serve important pedagogical purposes.Paying close attention to the ways in which emotions are implicated in our pedagogical practice can aid in the development of connections with and between students, which contributes to fostering a sense of collectivity in the carceral classroom that encourages students to learn from and with one another.We situate this as a form of relational ethics, which we exemplify using the…
Emotions and Carceral Spaces
Die alone, old, and let the cat eat your face”
Anti-feminist backlash has taken on a new form in the past decade with the rise of cyberattacks and the proliferation of Men’s Rights Activist groups, yet scant literature exists on the nature of cyber-harassment against feminist academics. This article uses the authors’ experience of cyber-harassment as a case study to explore the nature of online anti-feminist backlash against academic research. We identify three narrative forms of this backlas…
Prosecuting and Propagating Emotional Harm
This article explores emotional harm in the context of the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure in Canada. With the exception of Matthew Weait in the United Kingdom, few scholars have examined what harm means in cases of HIV nondisclosure. We conceptualize the harm that follows nondisclosure as an affective response to the “HIV positive Other” and argue that law creates a legal norm about what harm is and feels like in cases of HIV nondisclosure …
Vous étiez soulagé, mais en même temps terrifié
Pour la plupart des personnes détenues sous responsabilité fédérale, la zone d’admission et libération (AL) est la première étape lors de l’arrivée dans un pénitencier au Canada. De nombreuses personnes entrent dans l’aire d’admission et de libération avec des sentiments partagés de peur, d’anxiété et d’anticipation, et se traduisant par de puissants souvenirs émotionnels de cet environnement. À travers des données qualitatives recueillies lors d…
Emotions and Carceral Spaces
Emotions and Carceral Spaces
Emotions and Carceral Spaces
Emotions and Carceral Spaces
In the name of health
The discipline of public health is generally considered to advance a universal good and is often discussed as a moral and ethical mission that aims to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own health. However, the ardent promotion of public health discourses can also result in the hyper-policing and surveillance of marginalised communities, where the capital required to adhere to risk management is often systemically lacking or uno…
Surviving the Pandemic on the Inside
The COVID-19 global pandemic spurred unprecedented global lock downs and quarantines. In looking at the response to and the impacts of COVID-19 in Canadian prisons, we show how the global pandemic can illuminate the impacts of imprisonment to make them more tangible and relatable to the wider public who are largely disconnected from the prison experience. We begin this article by conceptualizing how ‘crisis governance’ produces new practices of p…
Medicalized Metamorphosis
When biographical disruption meets HIV exceptionalism
Drawing on interviews with civil society actors in the AIDS Service Organization (ASO) sector in Canada, this article explores how these actors contribute to shaping the illness identities of people living with HIV/AIDS in the shadow of efforts to criminalize exposure to HIV. While the biographically disruptive qualities associated with an HIV diagnosis have been addressed in the medical sociology literature, we turn our attention to the key role…
Now, the question here is who to believe’
This article examines how the judge, defence counsel and Crown prosecution in R. v. T.S . mobilised feeling and framing rules to assess the credibility of the complainants and accused. T.S. is a former Canadian Football League linebacker who was convicted of aggravated sexual assault for failing to disclose to two women that he is HIV positive. Our analysis of the trial transcripts reveals how T.S.’s failure to disclose his HIV-positive status an…
It’s like they don’t want you to get better’
This article examines how women incarcerated in provincial and federal prisons in Canada experience medicalization as the predominant form of correctional psy intervention. In order to privilege the oft ignored and typically silenced voices of incarcerated women, this article draws on life history interviews with 22 formerly incarcerated women who were living in halfway houses and working to transition from prison to the community. The analysis h…
You are what you eat
Building on Thomas Ugelvik’s (2011) work, this article seeks to capture the food-related experiences and challenges faced by provincially and federally incarcerated women in Canada. This research shows that criminalized women engage with food in different ways than Ugelvik’s sample of men did while in prison. We consider how prison fare operates as a form of status degradation and how the less eligibility principle allows for incarcerated populat…
Echoes of Imprisonment
Les femmes qui sortent de prison continuent de faire face à des épreuves provenant de leur emprisonnement. Dans cet article, nous abordons les façons dont la prison, et par extension l'État, suivent les femmes à l'extérieur de la prison jusque dans leurs communautés. Tandis que l'État tente d'assurer une réintégration réussie des ex-prisonnières, ses politiques, reflétant un agenda néolibéral de responsabilisation individuelle, entravent possible…
Emotional storytelling
More than 180 people in Canada have faced criminal charges related to HIV nondisclosure. Media coverage is often sensational and commonly portrays people living with HIV as hypersexualized threats to the (inter)national body politic. This article analyzes mainstream news media coverage of four HIV nondisclosure cases to examine how the accused (two men, two women) are constructed as sexual predators, which we found occurs through two key discursi…
Criminalization Creep”
This research note begins by situating some of the major areas of inquiry within social-science research on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS non-disclosure. The evolution of the use of this criminal justice measure in the attempt to regulate HIV/AIDS transmission illustrates what has been termed “criminalization creep,” whereby steadily increasing numbers of people are charged with increasingly severe crimes. We outline some of the key and precede…
It’s for their own good”
Based on eight in-depth interviews conducted with security guards who work in the psychiatric units of two hospitals located in Ottawa, Canada, this research found that private security agents unknowingly draw on Sykes and Matza’s five techniques of neutralization to justify their use of violence and coercive force against patients and to overcome their feelings of guilt for participating in the administration of brutal intervention practices, in…
Anchoring Amongst the Waves
The authors problematize essentialized notions of motherhood both ideologically and through criminalized women’s accounts of correctional programming discourses that engage these notions as a way to foster “motherhood as praxis.” Using data from interviews conducted with former female prisoners, we analyze how substance using mothers invoke the concept of a “good” mother by negotiating its meaning through techniques of self-surveillance and the s…
When biographical disruption meets HIV exceptionalism
Drawing on interviews with civil society actors in the AIDS Service Organization (ASO) sector in Canada, this article explores how these actors contribute to shaping the illness identities of people living with HIV/AIDS in the shadow of efforts to criminalize exposure to HIV. While the biographically disruptive qualities associated with an HIV diagnosis have been addressed in the medical sociology literature, we turn our attention to the key role…
Confessional Technologies and the Will to Disclose
You Start to Feel Like You’re Losing Your Mind”
Le nombre de femmes, particulièrement de femmes autochtones, incarcérées dans les pénitenciers fédéraux canadiens et dans des unités d’isolement a augmenté régulièrement au cours de la dernière décennie. Le présent article propose une analyse des politiques fondées sur l’intersectionnalité et utilise l’étude de cas d’une femme autochtone pour examiner comment les femmes purgeant une peine fédérale vivent l’isolement et les problèmes d’inégalité q…
Stories Matter
While the social sciences are experiencing narrative and emotional turns that are largely based on exploratory and theoretical qualitative research, the problematic dismissal of qualitative research approaches continues to loom large outside academia. Frequently described as a collection of “anecdotal stories,” qualitative research is dismissed as unscientific and unreliable— comments that limit the perceived usefulness of qualitative findings, e…
Criminal Code reform of HIV non-disclosure is urgently needed
Die alone, old, and let the cat eat your face”
Anti-feminist backlash has taken on a new form in the past decade with the rise of cyberattacks and the proliferation of Men’s Rights Activist groups, yet scant literature exists on the nature of cyber-harassment against feminist academics. This article uses the authors’ experience of cyber-harassment as a case study to explore the nature of online anti-feminist backlash against academic research. We identify three narrative forms of this backlas…
You Gotta Kick Ass a Little Harder Than That
This qualitative research explores the complex and dynamic ways in which eight hospital security men engage in hegemonic masculine practices that subordinate the gender identities of security women and marginalized men. These intensive, in-depth interviews reveal that alpha male status is accomplished through routine demonstrations of physicality and dominance over mental health patients and subordinated guards who present a feminine or queer gen…
Emotions and anti-carceral advocacy in Canada
Over the past three decades, Canada has expanded its capacity to confine citizens in ways that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities and people grappling with mental health and substance use issues, as well as poverty and homelessness. Carceral expansion, however, is not restricted to increasing institutional capacity; it also entails mechanisms to govern vulnerable people through the broader communi…
Surviving the Pandemic on the Inside
The COVID-19 global pandemic spurred unprecedented global lock downs and quarantines. In looking at the response to and the impacts of COVID-19 in Canadian prisons, we show how the global pandemic can illuminate the impacts of imprisonment to make them more tangible and relatable to the wider public who are largely disconnected from the prison experience. We begin this article by conceptualizing how ‘crisis governance’ produces new practices of p…
I just wanted them to see me’
This paper mobilizes the findings generated from in depth, in person interviews conducted with ten Black, HIV+ transgender women who had previously served time in local jails and prisons in the Atlanta region of the state of Georgia, USA. The paper explores how intersectional stigma emerges in the carceral environment in relation to the women’s multiple identity locations and the ways that HIV and transgender stigma in particular are linked to tw…
Counteracting shame, recognizing desire
This article considers how emotions shape law through specific consideration of the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure in Canada. As the majority of these cases involve heterosexual sex, we argue that Canada's aggressive prosecution is partially driven by carceral feminist attitudes toward protecting women's sexual purity. We contend that emotions structure punitive mentalities in ways that contribute to the expansion of carceral culture into n…
Mainstream Media and the F-Word
This article offers a narrative analysis of the two CBC Fifth Estate investigative documentaries about Ashley Smith (“Behind the Wall,” 2010; “Out of Control,” 2010) and juxtaposes the documentary narratives against claims made by feminist criminologists with respect to women’s corrections. Examining the coherent ‘through narrative’ that is constructed in each documentary, we claim that The Fifth Estate uses dominant medicalized conceptualization…
The creation of the expected Aboriginal woman drug offender in Canada
This article illustrates how the Aboriginal female drug user is responded to as an expected offender based on the intersection of her gender, race, and class. Drawing on the findings of a national Canadian study documenting the lived experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit female drug users, we argue that the strengthening of cultural identity can potentially disrupt this expected status at both the individual and social system levels. Wit…
Playing “mental judo”
Prisons are inherently emotional environments where both staff and prisoners engage in a continuous process of emotion management while working and living in carceral spaces. This paper explores how Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) values and norms shape how predominantly nonuniformed staff manage compassion inside the prison environment. This includes when and to whom they are allowed to express compassion, when they need to hide or suppress…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Institutionalizing Public Scholarship
This article contributes to recent debates about public sociology by considering the potential harmful consequences of seeking legitimacy for committed scholarship within academic institutions. After discussing public scholarship's place within the corporate university, we reflect on how institutionalizing 'scholarship with commitment' might create routine practices and standardized expectations that could discourage organic interactions with var…
Karla Homolka—From a Woman In Danger to a Dangerous Woman
In Canada in 1993, Karla Homolka was convicted of two counts of manslaughter in an Ontario court after entering into a plea bargain, which led to a reduced charge and sentence in return for her testimony against her husband, Paul Bernardo. Following her highly publicized trial, Karla Homolka was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Two years later, Paul Bernardo was declared a dangerous offender and was condemned to life imprisonment, for the mur…
Echoes of Imprisonment
Les femmes qui sortent de prison continuent de faire face à des épreuves provenant de leur emprisonnement. Dans cet article, nous abordons les façons dont la prison, et par extension l'État, suivent les femmes à l'extérieur de la prison jusque dans leurs communautés. Tandis que l'État tente d'assurer une réintégration réussie des ex-prisonnières, ses politiques, reflétant un agenda néolibéral de responsabilisation individuelle, entravent possible…
Anchoring Amongst the Waves
The authors problematize essentialized notions of motherhood both ideologically and through criminalized women’s accounts of correctional programming discourses that engage these notions as a way to foster “motherhood as praxis.” Using data from interviews conducted with former female prisoners, we analyze how substance using mothers invoke the concept of a “good” mother by negotiating its meaning through techniques of self-surveillance and the s…
Christine Tartaro and David Lester, Suicide and Self-Harm in Prisons and Jails
It’s like they don’t want you to get better’
This article examines how women incarcerated in provincial and federal prisons in Canada experience medicalization as the predominant form of correctional psy intervention. In order to privilege the oft ignored and typically silenced voices of incarcerated women, this article draws on life history interviews with 22 formerly incarcerated women who were living in halfway houses and working to transition from prison to the community. The analysis h…
Criminalization Creep”
This research note begins by situating some of the major areas of inquiry within social-science research on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS non-disclosure. The evolution of the use of this criminal justice measure in the attempt to regulate HIV/AIDS transmission illustrates what has been termed “criminalization creep,” whereby steadily increasing numbers of people are charged with increasingly severe crimes. We outline some of the key and precede…
The creation of the expected Aboriginal woman drug offender in Canada
This article illustrates how the Aboriginal female drug user is responded to as an expected offender based on the intersection of her gender, race, and class. Drawing on the findings of a national Canadian study documenting the lived experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit female drug users, we argue that the strengthening of cultural identity can potentially disrupt this expected status at both the individual and social system levels. Wit…
Violence politique, insécurité et résistance
Le présent article s’appuie sur une enquête qualitative qui porte sur les expériences de 48 femmes honduriennes à la suite du coup d’État qui a frappé leur pays le 28 juin 2009. Il souligne en particulier leurs expériences de la répression étatique et de la résistance citoyenne. C’est donc dans le contexte d’une insécurité humaine nourrie par la violence d’État que les circonstances qui ont entouré la vie de ces femmes après le coup d’État seront…
Demarginalizing Voices
Numerous books explore the "how to" of qualitative research, but few discuss what it means to actually engage in it, particularly when researchers adopt alternative methods to shed light on the experiences of marginalized populations. In Demarginalizing Voices, scholars share personal stories about their research with marginalized populations, including Aboriginal peoples, sex workers, the dead and the dying, women and men in prison, women and me…
You Gotta Kick Ass a Little Harder Than That
This qualitative research explores the complex and dynamic ways in which eight hospital security men engage in hegemonic masculine practices that subordinate the gender identities of security women and marginalized men. These intensive, in-depth interviews reveal that alpha male status is accomplished through routine demonstrations of physicality and dominance over mental health patients and subordinated guards who present a feminine or queer gen…
The Enigma of a Violent Woman
Karla Homolka has proven to be a figure of enduring interest to the public and media for the last 20 years. However, despite the widespread Canadian and international public commentary and media frenzy that has encircled this case, Homolka herself remains an enigma to most who write about her. In contrast to much of the contemporary discussion on this case, this book offers a comprehensive and detailed examination of the legal, public and media u…
You are what you eat
Building on Thomas Ugelvik’s (2011) work, this article seeks to capture the food-related experiences and challenges faced by provincially and federally incarcerated women in Canada. This research shows that criminalized women engage with food in different ways than Ugelvik’s sample of men did while in prison. We consider how prison fare operates as a form of status degradation and how the less eligibility principle allows for incarcerated populat…
It’s for their own good”
Based on eight in-depth interviews conducted with security guards who work in the psychiatric units of two hospitals located in Ottawa, Canada, this research found that private security agents unknowingly draw on Sykes and Matza’s five techniques of neutralization to justify their use of violence and coercive force against patients and to overcome their feelings of guilt for participating in the administration of brutal intervention practices, in…
Institutionalizing Public Scholarship
This article contributes to recent debates about public sociology by considering the potential harmful consequences of seeking legitimacy for committed scholarship within academic institutions. After discussing public scholarship's place within the corporate university, we reflect on how institutionalizing 'scholarship with commitment' might create routine practices and standardized expectations that could discourage organic interactions with var…
Confessional Technologies and the Will to Disclose
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Mainstream Media and the F-Word
This article offers a narrative analysis of the two CBC Fifth Estate investigative documentaries about Ashley Smith (“Behind the Wall,” 2010; “Out of Control,” 2010) and juxtaposes the documentary narratives against claims made by feminist criminologists with respect to women’s corrections. Examining the coherent ‘through narrative’ that is constructed in each documentary, we claim that The Fifth Estate uses dominant medicalized conceptualization…
Emotional storytelling
More than 180 people in Canada have faced criminal charges related to HIV nondisclosure. Media coverage is often sensational and commonly portrays people living with HIV as hypersexualized threats to the (inter)national body politic. This article analyzes mainstream news media coverage of four HIV nondisclosure cases to examine how the accused (two men, two women) are constructed as sexual predators, which we found occurs through two key discursi…
“We write as little as we have to”
The criminalization of HIV nondisclosure is reshaping the landscape of support and care for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). Focusing on Canada, this article examines how criminalization is reshaping the relationships between frontline AIDS Service Organization (ASO) workers and their HIV-positive service users. Using data gleaned through semi-structured interviews with N = 62 frontline ASO staff members across Canada that were coded using th…
Stories Matter
While the social sciences are experiencing narrative and emotional turns that are largely based on exploratory and theoretical qualitative research, the problematic dismissal of qualitative research approaches continues to loom large outside academia. Frequently described as a collection of “anecdotal stories,” qualitative research is dismissed as unscientific and unreliable— comments that limit the perceived usefulness of qualitative findings, e…
Counteracting shame, recognizing desire
This article considers how emotions shape law through specific consideration of the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure in Canada. As the majority of these cases involve heterosexual sex, we argue that Canada's aggressive prosecution is partially driven by carceral feminist attitudes toward protecting women's sexual purity. We contend that emotions structure punitive mentalities in ways that contribute to the expansion of carceral culture into n…
Now, the question here is who to believe’
This article examines how the judge, defence counsel and Crown prosecution in R. v. T.S . mobilised feeling and framing rules to assess the credibility of the complainants and accused. T.S. is a former Canadian Football League linebacker who was convicted of aggravated sexual assault for failing to disclose to two women that he is HIV positive. Our analysis of the trial transcripts reveals how T.S.’s failure to disclose his HIV-positive status an…
I just wanted them to see me’
This paper mobilizes the findings generated from in depth, in person interviews conducted with ten Black, HIV+ transgender women who had previously served time in local jails and prisons in the Atlanta region of the state of Georgia, USA. The paper explores how intersectional stigma emerges in the carceral environment in relation to the women’s multiple identity locations and the ways that HIV and transgender stigma in particular are linked to tw…
You Start to Feel Like You’re Losing Your Mind”
Le nombre de femmes, particulièrement de femmes autochtones, incarcérées dans les pénitenciers fédéraux canadiens et dans des unités d’isolement a augmenté régulièrement au cours de la dernière décennie. Le présent article propose une analyse des politiques fondées sur l’intersectionnalité et utilise l’étude de cas d’une femme autochtone pour examiner comment les femmes purgeant une peine fédérale vivent l’isolement et les problèmes d’inégalité q…
Medicalized Metamorphosis
Political science (40 works) · Sociology (39 works) · Criminology (38 works) · Psychology (30 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (28 works) · Law (26 works) · Law (17 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works)