Michael Orsini
Biographic Data
| ID | 322485 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Orsini |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Orsini |
| SIGNATURE | ORSINI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Ottawa |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4880-1707 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 132 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Empathetic policy design
We like to be in the tent
Vagues de capacitisme
Drawing on critical disability studies and affect theory, this paper centers the affective arrangements that have governed the COVID-19 pandemic, and looks ahead to new articulations that might emerge in which disability and ableism structure state responses. While the last two plus years have demonstrated in powerful ways how COVID-19 is a space brimming with affective energies, they have also shown us that health emergencies can be the occasion…
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…
Discursive positions on charitable sector advocacy in Canada
Canadian charities have a history of advocating for social and policy change. With the 1985 Income Tax Act, charities became restricted to using up to 10% of their resources toward nonpartisan political activities. They subsequently underwent an audit initiated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2012. The legal climate changed again when the 10% rule was dropped in 2018, enabling charities to pursue political activities with no predefined limit.…
Waves of Ableism
Drawing on critical disability studies and affect theory, this paper centers the affective arrangements that have governed the COVID-19 pandemic, and looks ahead to new articulations that might emerge in which disability and ableism structure state responses. While the last two plus years have demonstrated in powerful ways how COVID-19 is a space brimming with affective energies, they have also shown us that health emergencies can be the occasion…
Problematising older motherhood in Canada
This article examines how older motherhood and older mothers are problematised and represented in key Canadian policy texts on ‘delayed childbearing’ and ‘advanced maternal age’. Drawing on critical disability studies and feminist scholarship on motherhood, we identify three kinds of representations of older mothers in these texts: as risk-producing subjects, as unnatural mothers, and as irresponsible reproductive citizens. We argue that dominant…
Who needs to (un)know? On the generative possibilities of ignorance for autistic futures
This article advances an (anti)agenda that would center unknowing as a necessary tool to remake autism. While much of the literature on the social study of ignorance describes its corrosive effects for democracy or how ignorance fuels epistemic injustice, I argue that some harms committed against autistic people have come from well-meaning attempts to know. A newly invigorated “critical” autism studies could foreground a project of ignorance to c…
The end of exceptionalism or exceptionalism by other means? unraveling the contradictions of HIV/Aids governance in Canada
How is HIV/AIDS both exceptional yet no longer worthy of a distinct state response? Reflecting on state efforts in Canada to normalize HIV/AIDS and fold it into a more integrated response to sexually transmitted infections and bloodborne illnesses, we examine how ‘end of HIV/AIDS exceptionalism’ narratives obscure the new ways in which state power is being deployed such that, at the level of bodies and community organizations, actors are still su…
Beyond Measure? Disability Art, Affect and Reimagining Visitor Experience
Disability, mad and d/Deaf arts are motivated to transform the arts sector and beyond in ways that foreground differing embodiments. But how do we know if such arts-based interventions are actually disrupting conventional ways of experiencing and consuming art? This article presents three themes from a critical literature review relevant to curating and creating artwork meant to spur social change related to non-normative bodies. We highlight exa…
Governing Through Remorse
This article examines the emotional terrain and discursive frames that govern the constitution of those subject to the “dangerous offender” (DO) designation in Canada. Focusing on the emotion of remorse, we discuss four narratives involving individuals who went through the DO hearing process, gaining significant media attention. Asking what role Indigeneity and other factors play in how the media discuss the emotional comportment of DOs, we exami…
Intersections of Treatment, Surveillance, and Criminal Law Responses to HIV and Covid-19
Intersections of Treatment, Surveillance, and Criminal Law Responses to HIV and COVID-19 Colin Hastings PhD, Alexander McClelland PhD, Adrian Guta PhD, MSW, Maureen Owino MES, Eli Manning PhD, MSW, Michael Orsini PhD, Richard Elliott LLM, Marilou Gagnon PhD, RN, and Stephen Molldrem PhD Affiliation Colin Hastings is with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC. Alexander McClelland is with the Institute of…
Feeling critical
COVID-19 has been marked by sharp intensities of feeling. Grief has indelibly marked this time of COVID-19, even as the sheer avalanche of death has transformed the distinctive journey of grief int
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…
Governing Covid-19 without government in Brazil
Brazil's governance of the COVID-19 pandemic has been described as nothing short of tragic by several commentators. President Jair Bolsonaro's dangerous brew of neoliberal authoritarianism, science denialism and ableism has plunged this country into catastrophe. In this article we argue that this form (or lack) of public health governance can best be described as governance without (central) government. We begin with an overview of public health …
“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…
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…
Confessional Technologies and the Will to Disclose
Mobilizing Metaphor
Critical autism studies
Critical autism studies: exploring epistemic dialogues and intersections, challenging dominant understandings of autismIn this paper we explore how our cultural contexts give rise to different kinds of knowledges of autism and examine how they are articulated, gain currency, and form the basis for policy, practice and political movements.We outline key tensions for the development of critical autism studies as an international, critical abilities…
Narrating Sustainability in C anadian Health Care Reform Discourse
In C anada, as in other industrialized welfare states, definitions of health system sustainability reflect different goals and correspondingly diverse ways of understanding exactly what is to be sustained and how. In this article, we report on results from a survey of documents and groups involved in and/or concerned about sustainability of the healthcare system. We identify four broad narratives of sustainability in C anadian healthcare reform d…
Embodying experience and expertise
This paper compares the advocacy of mothers and intended mothers in the fields of autism and infertility. Mothers and intended mothers have developed a special competence in dealing with professionals, and in negotiating the delicate balance between expert medical discourses and expertise grounded in their situated knowledge and experiences. Drawing on the social movement and public policy literature, we seek to disrupt taken-for-granted assumpti…
Introduction to critical policy studies
Contesting the Autistic Subject
This chapter explores the constitution of subjectivity in the so called “autism wars,” which have pitted parents of autistic children seeking access to treatment/ therapy against those who are more interested in advancing a notion of autism that frees it from the straitjacket of being viewed as a crippling disability. I argue that the ways in which the autistic subject is framed has important implication for the types of activist strategies advan…
Social movements, knowledge and public policy
This paper explores the role of social movements in the policy process and, in particular, the ways in which movements interact with, access, and deploy expert knowledge. In the technocratic model, citizens are conceptualized as undifferentiated, rather than considered in terms of distinctive identities or interests. Their inclusion in policy-making is viewed as a technical problem to be 'solved' through forms of citizen engagement, rather than v…
Evidence‐based Engagement in the Voluntary Sector
The shift towards governance and greater reliance on third parties in the design, implementation and evaluation of policy has created new pressures to ensure that policies are designed and delivered in a consistent and effective manner. In the interest of improving transparency, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency, governments in Canada and in the UK, as in many industrialized countries, have begun to emphasize the need for evidence‐base…
Critical autism studies
Critical autism studies: exploring epistemic dialogues and intersections, challenging dominant understandings of autismIn this paper we explore how our cultural contexts give rise to different kinds of knowledges of autism and examine how they are articulated, gain currency, and form the basis for policy, practice and political movements.We outline key tensions for the development of critical autism studies as an international, critical abilities…
Autism, Neurodiversity and the Welfare State
In the last decade, autism has become one of the most hotly contested health policy issues in North America and beyond. From debates about the role of vaccines to the efficacy of therapeutic interventions, a range of civil society actors has been advocating for policy and societal change in the field, with mixed success. In Canada, this culminated in 2004 with a much-publicized Supreme Court decision—Auton v. British Columbia—that pitted parents …
The Politics of Naming, Blaming and Claiming
The term ''blood activism'' describes the range of collective challenges that arose among victims of Canada's tainted-blood scandal in the 1990s. This article examines the emergence of blood activism in Canada from the perspective of social movement theory, paying particular attention to the tensions between victims who contracted HIV through tainted blood and those who contracted Hepatitis C, the so-called ''forgotten victims'' of the tragedy. T…
Feeling critical
COVID-19 has been marked by sharp intensities of feeling. Grief has indelibly marked this time of COVID-19, even as the sheer avalanche of death has transformed the distinctive journey of grief int
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
Every Virus Tells a Story”
Combining insights from narrative inquiry and participatory policy analysis, this article analyses the “illness narratives” of people with hepatitis C, a blood-borne liver disease that affects millions of people around the world. In particular, we explore how a narrative-based approach to health politics and policy can illuminate our understanding of the social dimensions of health and illness. In incorporating the “experiential” knowledge of peo…
Criminal Code reform of HIV non-disclosure is urgently needed
Embodying experience and expertise
This paper compares the advocacy of mothers and intended mothers in the fields of autism and infertility. Mothers and intended mothers have developed a special competence in dealing with professionals, and in negotiating the delicate balance between expert medical discourses and expertise grounded in their situated knowledge and experiences. Drawing on the social movement and public policy literature, we seek to disrupt taken-for-granted assumpti…
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…
The end of exceptionalism or exceptionalism by other means? unraveling the contradictions of HIV/Aids governance in Canada
How is HIV/AIDS both exceptional yet no longer worthy of a distinct state response? Reflecting on state efforts in Canada to normalize HIV/AIDS and fold it into a more integrated response to sexually transmitted infections and bloodborne illnesses, we examine how ‘end of HIV/AIDS exceptionalism’ narratives obscure the new ways in which state power is being deployed such that, at the level of bodies and community organizations, actors are still su…
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…
Narrating Sustainability in C anadian Health Care Reform Discourse
In C anada, as in other industrialized welfare states, definitions of health system sustainability reflect different goals and correspondingly diverse ways of understanding exactly what is to be sustained and how. In this article, we report on results from a survey of documents and groups involved in and/or concerned about sustainability of the healthcare system. We identify four broad narratives of sustainability in C anadian healthcare reform d…
Discursive positions on charitable sector advocacy in Canada
Canadian charities have a history of advocating for social and policy change. With the 1985 Income Tax Act, charities became restricted to using up to 10% of their resources toward nonpartisan political activities. They subsequently underwent an audit initiated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2012. The legal climate changed again when the 10% rule was dropped in 2018, enabling charities to pursue political activities with no predefined limit.…
Who needs to (un)know? On the generative possibilities of ignorance for autistic futures
This article advances an (anti)agenda that would center unknowing as a necessary tool to remake autism. While much of the literature on the social study of ignorance describes its corrosive effects for democracy or how ignorance fuels epistemic injustice, I argue that some harms committed against autistic people have come from well-meaning attempts to know. A newly invigorated “critical” autism studies could foreground a project of ignorance to c…
Beyond Measure? Disability Art, Affect and Reimagining Visitor Experience
Disability, mad and d/Deaf arts are motivated to transform the arts sector and beyond in ways that foreground differing embodiments. But how do we know if such arts-based interventions are actually disrupting conventional ways of experiencing and consuming art? This article presents three themes from a critical literature review relevant to curating and creating artwork meant to spur social change related to non-normative bodies. We highlight exa…
Intersections of Treatment, Surveillance, and Criminal Law Responses to HIV and Covid-19
Intersections of Treatment, Surveillance, and Criminal Law Responses to HIV and COVID-19 Colin Hastings PhD, Alexander McClelland PhD, Adrian Guta PhD, MSW, Maureen Owino MES, Eli Manning PhD, MSW, Michael Orsini PhD, Richard Elliott LLM, Marilou Gagnon PhD, RN, and Stephen Molldrem PhD Affiliation Colin Hastings is with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC. Alexander McClelland is with the Institute of…
Jeffrey M. Ayres — Defying Conventional Wisdom
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
The Politics of Naming, Blaming and Claiming
The term ''blood activism'' describes the range of collective challenges that arose among victims of Canada's tainted-blood scandal in the 1990s. This article examines the emergence of blood activism in Canada from the perspective of social movement theory, paying particular attention to the tensions between victims who contracted HIV through tainted blood and those who contracted Hepatitis C, the so-called ''forgotten victims'' of the tragedy. T…
Evidence‐based Engagement in the Voluntary Sector
The shift towards governance and greater reliance on third parties in the design, implementation and evaluation of policy has created new pressures to ensure that policies are designed and delivered in a consistent and effective manner. In the interest of improving transparency, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency, governments in Canada and in the UK, as in many industrialized countries, have begun to emphasize the need for evidence‐base…
Every Virus Tells a Story”
Combining insights from narrative inquiry and participatory policy analysis, this article analyses the “illness narratives” of people with hepatitis C, a blood-borne liver disease that affects millions of people around the world. In particular, we explore how a narrative-based approach to health politics and policy can illuminate our understanding of the social dimensions of health and illness. In incorporating the “experiential” knowledge of peo…
Critical Policy Studies
"Traditional definitions of public policy in Canada have been challenged in recent years by globalization, the transition to a knowledge-based economy, and the rise of new technologies. Critical Policy Studies describes how new policy problems such as border screening and global warming have been catapulted onto the agenda in the neo-liberal era. The book also surveys the recent evolution of critical approaches to policy studies, which have trans…
Critical Policy Studies
Traditional definitions of public policy in Canada have been challenged in recent years by globalization, the transition to a knowledge-based economy, and the rise of new technologies. Critical Policy Studies describes how new policy problems such as border screening and global warming have been catapulted onto the agenda in the neo-liberal era. The book also surveys the recent evolution of critical approaches to policy studies, which have transf…
Reframing Medical Injury? Viewing People With Hemophilia as Victims of Cultural Injustice
There is a burgeoning literature in the social sciences on the politics of reparations for historical injustices. Using a case study of Canada, this article asks whether people with hemophilia who contracted HIV and/or hepatitis C through the blood system should be viewed as victims of cultural injustice. The dominant approach to understanding the claims made on behalf of tainted-blood recipients is the narrow frame of compensation for medical in…
Lorna Weir, Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics
Social movements, knowledge and public policy
This paper explores the role of social movements in the policy process and, in particular, the ways in which movements interact with, access, and deploy expert knowledge. In the technocratic model, citizens are conceptualized as undifferentiated, rather than considered in terms of distinctive identities or interests. Their inclusion in policy-making is viewed as a technical problem to be 'solved' through forms of citizen engagement, rather than v…
Autism, Neurodiversity and the Welfare State
In the last decade, autism has become one of the most hotly contested health policy issues in North America and beyond. From debates about the role of vaccines to the efficacy of therapeutic interventions, a range of civil society actors has been advocating for policy and societal change in the field, with mixed success. In Canada, this culminated in 2004 with a much-publicized Supreme Court decision—Auton v. British Columbia—that pitted parents …
Introduction to critical policy studies
Handbook of Critical Policy Studies
Critical policy studies, as illustrated in this Handbook, challenges the conventional approaches public policy inquiry. But it offers important innovations as well, in particular its focus on discursive politics, policy argumentation and deliberation, and interpretive modes of analysis
Globalization and the health of Canadians
BACKGROUND: Globalization describes processes of greater integration of the world economy through increased flows of goods, services, capital and people. Globalization has undergone significant transformation since the 1970s, entrenching neoliberal economics as the dominant model of global market integration. Although this transformation has generated some health gains, since the 1990s it has also increased health disparities. METHODS: As part of…
Handbook of Critical Policy Studies
Mobilizing Metaphor
Critical autism studies
Critical autism studies: exploring epistemic dialogues and intersections, challenging dominant understandings of autismIn this paper we explore how our cultural contexts give rise to different kinds of knowledges of autism and examine how they are articulated, gain currency, and form the basis for policy, practice and political movements.We outline key tensions for the development of critical autism studies as an international, critical abilities…
Narrating Sustainability in C anadian Health Care Reform Discourse
In C anada, as in other industrialized welfare states, definitions of health system sustainability reflect different goals and correspondingly diverse ways of understanding exactly what is to be sustained and how. In this article, we report on results from a survey of documents and groups involved in and/or concerned about sustainability of the healthcare system. We identify four broad narratives of sustainability in C anadian healthcare reform d…
Embodying experience and expertise
This paper compares the advocacy of mothers and intended mothers in the fields of autism and infertility. Mothers and intended mothers have developed a special competence in dealing with professionals, and in negotiating the delicate balance between expert medical discourses and expertise grounded in their situated knowledge and experiences. Drawing on the social movement and public policy literature, we seek to disrupt taken-for-granted assumpti…
Confessional Technologies and the Will to Disclose
“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…
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…
Governing Covid-19 without government in Brazil
Brazil's governance of the COVID-19 pandemic has been described as nothing short of tragic by several commentators. President Jair Bolsonaro's dangerous brew of neoliberal authoritarianism, science denialism and ableism has plunged this country into catastrophe. In this article we argue that this form (or lack) of public health governance can best be described as governance without (central) government. We begin with an overview of public health …
The end of exceptionalism or exceptionalism by other means? unraveling the contradictions of HIV/Aids governance in Canada
How is HIV/AIDS both exceptional yet no longer worthy of a distinct state response? Reflecting on state efforts in Canada to normalize HIV/AIDS and fold it into a more integrated response to sexually transmitted infections and bloodborne illnesses, we examine how ‘end of HIV/AIDS exceptionalism’ narratives obscure the new ways in which state power is being deployed such that, at the level of bodies and community organizations, actors are still su…
Beyond Measure? Disability Art, Affect and Reimagining Visitor Experience
Disability, mad and d/Deaf arts are motivated to transform the arts sector and beyond in ways that foreground differing embodiments. But how do we know if such arts-based interventions are actually disrupting conventional ways of experiencing and consuming art? This article presents three themes from a critical literature review relevant to curating and creating artwork meant to spur social change related to non-normative bodies. We highlight exa…
Governing Through Remorse
This article examines the emotional terrain and discursive frames that govern the constitution of those subject to the “dangerous offender” (DO) designation in Canada. Focusing on the emotion of remorse, we discuss four narratives involving individuals who went through the DO hearing process, gaining significant media attention. Asking what role Indigeneity and other factors play in how the media discuss the emotional comportment of DOs, we exami…
Political science (28 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Law (22 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Medicine (13 works) · Criminology (11 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Public relations (8 works)