Kevin Walby
Biographic Data
| ID | 112398 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin Walby |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin |
| FAMILY NAME | Walby |
| SIGNATURE | WALBY K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Winnipeg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5107-2309 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 144 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 459 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 138 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Data brokers in the shadows
Resistance at the Carceral Precipice
British Legacy in Canadian Military Museums
This article examines how military museums in Canada represent Britishness. As a former British colony, Canadian government agencies have long emulated British institutions. Britishness as well as The Royal Family played a central role in Canadian culture throughout the first half of the 20th century, including in the military. We examine how military museums depict the relationship between Britain and Canada and the effect of representations of …
Public police as a greedy institution
Carceral Power and Emotions
F ocusing on emotions in research and writing can help to reveal moments of injustice and legacies of inequity in our society.Despite the importance of emotions to meaning and wellbeing, there are many mechanisms of control in everyday life that discourage us from sharing emotions or talking about them.This kind of silencing or muting eff ect when it comes to emotions are experienced tenfold inside the prison walls.It is therefore hugely importan…
Teaching Introduction to Walls to Bridges in a Canadian Prison
Feeling ‘like part of the action’
Outline of an interdisciplinary method
Political Activist Ethnography
‘Sadly, my group was “hanged” at the end of the evening’
Escape rooms are a popular new form of leisure and amusement globally, including in North American cities. Based on a thematic and discourse analysis of online content, we examine ten carceral-themed escape room operations in the United States and Canada. Drawing on theories of cultural power and neoliberalism, we analyze the messages conveyed by site operators about the deservingness of life, freedom and justice for imprisoned people. Contributi…
From Systems of Abuse to Circles of Care
Invading Indigenous Territory is Not Reconciliation”
Context: Leading up to the March 2020 global COVID-19 lockdown, an important movement was building power across so-called Canada. What began as a continuation of the decades-long, localized struggle for self-determination in Wet’suwet’en territory quickly became a focal point for nationwide Indigenous resistance, refusal, and solidarity. Analysis: Drawing from literature on media framing, this article examines the use of war frames in early 2020 …
Strategic incapacitation, scaled up
In June 2018, the 44th Group of Seven (G7) Summit was held in La Malbaie in the Province of Quebec, Canada. Drawing from geographic and sociological literature on protest and social movement policing and applying the concept of scale, we examine techniques of summit security deployed for the event. Analysing the results of access to information requests, we investigate pre-summit planning as well as the surveillance operations undertaken by milit…
Fantastical Authenticity in Correctional Officer Recruitment Videos
Criminal justice agencies increasingly recruit new personnel online using social media. This paper analyzes correctional officer recruitment videos appearing on YouTube. Engaging with literature on social media representations and authenticity, we examine the content and the themes appearing in these videos. We use a grounded theory approach to data analysis accompanied by a semiotic reading of these video texts. We argue that these video represe…
Governing through transparency
This paper examines the state of Canada’s federal access to information (ATI) regime. Drawing from literature on government transparency, we conceptualize Bill C-58 and the problems it proposes to address as a form of policy discordance. We assess the recent digitization of ATI in Canada by analyzing data on request abandonment, record exemptions, as well as variation by ministry. In so doing, we identify tensions between strategic narratives of …
Slow Panic? The Regulation of Salvia Divinorum in Canada, 1991-2019
Smoking a potent concentration of salvia divinorum (hereafter salvia) has the capacity to dissolve one’s ego and sense of self. Due to the catatonic state a strong dose of salvia produces, the substance has been considered alarming by claims-makers including politicians, media officials, police, and citizen groups. This paper examines news media accounts of salvia use in Canada and salvia’s regulation by the Canadian federal government. Providing…
Changing of the Guards
Although service outsourcing has spread throughout Canada’s prisons and jails, into its police, courts, and national security institutions, and along the border in recent decades, the expanding scope and pace of corporate involvement in criminal justice functions has not been closely investigated. Changing of the Guards provides a comprehensive assessment of privatization and private influence across the twenty-first-century Canadian criminal jus…
‘A prison is no place for a party’
This paper explores a case study of the struggle over the cultural meanings of charity and imprisonment related to United Way’s 2019 Rockin’ The Big House fundraising concert in partnership with Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and the City of Kingston at Kingston Penitentiary. Contributing to literature at the intersection of penality, prison tourism, and the charitable sector, we examine how staging authenticity and fostering penal spectato…
Carceral-capital-charitable politics in Kingston, Ontario
(Beyond) Life in Prison
Algorithmic thinking in the public interest
SWAT everywhere? A response to Jenkins, Semple, Bennell, and Huey
This paper is a response to an article on public police special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams written by Jenkins and colleagues (2020). Jenkins and colleagues are responding to a study showing that tactical units and members are being used more in Canadian policing. For Jenkins and colleagues, not only are SWAT teams being used properly, but drawing from interviews with tactical members they suggest SWAT teams should be used more in the future…
Jumpstarting the Justice Disciplines
Computational methods are increasingly popular in criminal justice research. As more criminal justice data becomes available in 'big' and other digital formats, new means of embracing the computational turn are needed. In this article, we propose a framework for data collection and case sampling using computational methods, allowing researchers to conduct thick qualitative research – analyses concerned with the particularities of a social context…
Deciphering the Decline
Background: Newspaper op-eds are an underexplored mode of communication that frame social, cultural, and political issues. Analysis: This article uses an unsupervised machine-learning approach called structural topic modelling to map changes in the content of a corpus of Canadian newspaper op-eds on freedom of information (FOI) law spanning a 20-year period. This makes it possible to investigate changes in the content of newspaper op-eds over tim…
Pseudo-authenticity and tourism
Access to Information and Freedom of Information Requests
Access to information (ATI) and freedom of information (FOI) mechanisms are now relevant features of governments in many liberal democracies today. Citizens, organizations, and permanent residents in several countries across the globe can request unpublished information from federal, provincial, state, county, and municipal government agencies. However, most qualitative researchers appear to be unfamiliar with ATI/FOI or write it off as an approa…
Making up ‘Terror Identities’
Drawing on analysis of government records obtained using Access to Information Act (ATIA) requests, we examine policing and surveillance projects developed in preparation for three mega-events that recently took place in Canada – the 2010 Winter Olympics, the G8/G20 meetings and a scheduled (but cancelled) North American Leaders Summit. Based on an investigation of ‘Threat Assessment’ reports produced between 2005 and 2010 by the Royal Canadian M…
Interviews as encounters
Few qualitative sociologists have considered how men who have sex with men hold diverse understandings of sexuality and how these matter in research encounters, especially as it regards 'touchy' interview topics such as intimacy, intercourse and men's bodies. Drawing from transcripts and field notes concerning my experiences of interviewing 30 male-for-male internet escorts in Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto (Canada), Houston and New York (USA), as wel…
Theorizing freedom of information
Spatial Regulation, Dispersal, and the Aesthetics of the City
In this article, we examine the spatial regulation of homeless people by National Capital Commission (NCC) conservation officers in Canada's capital city, Ottawa. We explore NCC officer practices by analyzing occurrence reports obtained through access to information (ATI) requests and interview transcripts. We contend that policing of NCC parks is organized according to a logic of dispersal. Dispersal policing aims to preserve an aesthetic for pu…
How Closed-Circuit Television Surveillance Organizes the Social
Institutional ethnography is a sociological method of inquiry which problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience, while examining how series of texts coordinate actions, consciousness, and forms of organization in extra-local settings. This paper will demonstrate that institutional ethnography is a critically innovative way to study the socio-technical dynamics of camera surveillance. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) surve…
On the Social Relations of Research
Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience and examines how textual sequences coordinate consciousness and ruling relations. This article explicates some of the shortcomings of IE, so future institutional ethnographers can work with these. I offer a critical assessment of IE, focusing on its ontology of the social and the issue of truncation, the constitutive her…
Getting at the Live Archive
Most of the draft documents, memoranda, communications, and other textual materials amassed by government agencies do not become public record unless efforts are taken to obtain their release. One mechanism for doing so is “access to information” (ATI) or “freedom of information” (FOI) law. Individuals and organizations in Canada have a quasi-constitutional right to request information from federal, provincial, and municipal levels of government.…
Institutional ethnography and data analysis
Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that investigates how everyday experiences are coordinated by work done with texts in organisations. Methodologically, IE relies on interviews, observations and document review to produce data. Yet strategies for data analysis in IE have not received as much attention as have issues of data production, the latter of which can be further refined. Although many types of qualitative data analysis…
Brokering Access Beyond the Border and in the Wild
Contributing to literature on jurisdictional variation in freedom of information (FOI) law and policy, we draw from accounts of experiences of FOI requests submitted to police agencies in nine Canadian provinces and ten US states. We conceptualize these experiences using notions of “brokering access,” “law in the wild,” and “feral law.” Our findings demonstrate key differences in how public police agencies store, prepare, and disclose information…
Staged authenticity in penal history sites across Canada
Literature on penal tourism has examined meanings of imprisonment and punishment communicated in infamous American (e.g. Alcatraz, Eastern State Penitentiary), Australian (e.g. Fannie Bay Gaol, Port Arthur) and South African (e.g. Robben Island) sites. Yet such research has not extensively drawn from academic debates on authenticity and heritage that have become prominent in tourism research. This article examines the staging of authenticity in l…
Beyond folk devil resistance
This article is a contribution to widening the focus of moral panic studies. Our aim is to advance recent attempts to link moral panic studies to the criminological literature on moral regulation. We argue that moral panics should be conceptualized as volatile expressions of long-term moral regulation processes. To substantiate these conceptual and theoretical arguments, we examine claims-making activities about the threat posed by British youth …
Problematizing Carceral Tours
Tours of operational prisons and jails have been advocated by some academics as one way of conducting observational research inside carceral institutions and have also been employed as a university-level pedagogical tool for teaching students about the realities of imprisonment. Though the merits of carceral tours as a knowledge-producing practice have been discussed in criminology and related social scientific disciplines, accounts of their limi…
Sporting Girls, Streetwalkers, and Inmates of Houses of Ill Repute
This article examines the mutability of symbolic sanctions- or stigmas-applied to sex industry work by examining newspaper narratives in one medium-sized Canadian city over two time periods: 1870-1910 and 1980-2004. The article's purpose is first to get a sense of what the authors call the ecology of stigmas-their relation to the temporal and spatial contexts in which they are produced-and second to give needed historical context to them and the …
Contributions to a Post-Sovereigntist Understanding of Law
This article proposes an understanding of law that goes beyond the popular association of law with sovereignty, constitutionalism and representative political institutions. By drawing on insights provided by the law as governance and `non-essentialist version of legal pluralism' approaches, the focus is on retrieving the specificity of plural legal and normative ordering strategies. The law as governance approach proposes a modest role for law wh…
Criteria for quality in qualitative research and use of freedom of information requests in the social sciences
Access to information (ATI) and freedom of information (FOI) requests are an under-used means of producing data in the social sciences, especially across Canada and the United States. We use literature on criteria for quality in qualitative inquiry to enhance ongoing debates and developments in ATI/FOI research, and to extend literature on quality in qualitative inquiry. We do this by building on Tracy's (2010) article on criteria for quality in …
Facilitating Prisoner Ethnography
In this article, we reflect on the position of researcher-as-facilitator of prisoner ethnography. By privileging the standpoint and the voice of prisoners as a way of knowing about carceral spaces, we differentiate between the position of researcher-as-facilitator of prisoner ethnography and other approaches to ethnography in prisons. Based on our editorial work with the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons-a peer-reviewed and academically-oriented jo…
The rise of biocriminology
Revisiting the contributions of numerous foundational biocriminological works, this article uses the concept 'bodily economies' to analyze the emergence and solidification of criminological pathologizations of the bios dependent on the capture and analysis of human corporeal matter. The scholars we discuss (Lombroso, Ellis, Goring, Hooton, and the Gluecks) each causally equate some part of the body with inbuilt criminality. Through an exegesis of…
They attacked the city
Contributing to the sociological literature on protest policing at international summits, this article analyses security intelligence practices related to the 2010 G20 meetings in Toronto, Canada. Drawing from the results of access to information requests with policing and intelligence agencies at municipal, provincial and federal levels, the authors demonstrate the central role of intelligence and threat assessments in international summit polic…
Bridging or fostering social distance? An analysis of penal spectator comments on Canadian penal history museums
Penal history museums are among the sites where cultural meanings about prisoners and imprisonment are developed, communicated, and consumed. Little research has explored what visitors take from these encounters. Drawing on literature concerning new media communication and Brown’s (2009) work on penal spectatorship, we analyze visitor comments about their sojourns into Canadian penal history sites found on TripAdvisor, a global travel website. We…
Institutional Ethnography and Surveillance Studies
Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience, while examining how sequences of texts coordinate consciousness, actions, and ruling. I argue that institutional ethnography is a critical method of inquiry useful for revealing and reshaping the textual organization of surveillance. Central issues regarding institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry, including st…
Private Eyes and Public Order
This article examines how policing, security, and intelligence agencies have networked with private agents in a campaign targeting Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) in Canada. SHAC is a network of autonomous groups that coordinate an international campaign to disrupt the animal testing corporation, Huntingdon Life Sciences. Unlike in the USA and the UK, where SHAC groups have been targeted by a series of extraordinary legislative initiatives …
The visual politics of public police Instagram use in Canada
Public police now use online and social media spaces as forums for communication. Drawing from discourse and semiotic analysis, and contributing to literature on police image management, we analyze police Instagram communications from five Canadian cities. Focusing on public police services' Instagram posts, which are more indebted to visual communication than Twitter and Facebook, we examine the ways police communications frame community and div…
Special weapons and tactics teams in Canadian policing
Despite extensive social science analysis of special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team deployment across the United States, the phenomenon in Canada has been overlooked. Drawing from data on deployments disclosed under freedom of information (FOI), legal decisions, and media data, our findings reveal that the use of SWAT teams have escalated in many major Canadian cities. Public police now deploy SWAT teams across Canada for routine law enforcement…
Governing through transparency
This paper examines the state of Canada’s federal access to information (ATI) regime. Drawing from literature on government transparency, we conceptualize Bill C-58 and the problems it proposes to address as a form of policy discordance. We assess the recent digitization of ATI in Canada by analyzing data on request abandonment, record exemptions, as well as variation by ministry. In so doing, we identify tensions between strategic narratives of …
Institutional Ethnography and Surveillance Studies
Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience, while examining how sequences of texts coordinate consciousness, actions, and ruling. I argue that institutional ethnography is a critical method of inquiry useful for revealing and reshaping the textual organization of surveillance. Central issues regarding institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry, including st…
Little England? The rise of open-street Closed-Circuit Television surveillance in Canada
Social monitoring is often explained in terms of top-down or hierarchal forms of power, which is reflected in the reliance on neo-Marxist and disciplinary society analytical frameworks in contemporary studies of open-street closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance. Established surveillance theories cannot account for instances when citizens themselves seek out regulatory measures in their own communities. Community schemes can precede and in…
How Closed-Circuit Television Surveillance Organizes the Social
Institutional ethnography is a sociological method of inquiry which problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience, while examining how series of texts coordinate actions, consciousness, and forms of organization in extra-local settings. This paper will demonstrate that institutional ethnography is a critically innovative way to study the socio-technical dynamics of camera surveillance. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) surve…
Supplementing the panoptic paradigm
Following the London subway bombings in July 2005, closed-circuit television surveillance (CCTV) became an international object of political and public interest when images of the bombers were broadcast around the world. What was particularly striking about the media coverage on public CCTV surveillance was the shift in crime control discourses from prevention to capture. That is, CCTV surveillance was not represented primarily as a technology ca…
A Great Duty
Reviewed by: A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939-1967 Kevin Walby Leonard B. Kuffert , A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939-1967. Montreal: McGill-Queen' s University Press. 2003, 348 pp. The binary of "high" versus "mass" culture is a key dichotomy informing the humanities and social sciences. Kuffert's central argument in A Great Duty is that a number of mid-20th century Canad…
A Great Duty
Locating Televisual and Non‐Televisual Textual Sequences with Institutional Ethnography
There is a longstanding social scientific practice of focusing on verbal and written accounts as forms of data to the neglect of televisual materials. In this paper I address the above problematic by examining the productive power of video as a means of organizing social and work relations. Treating video as a form of text which is activated by human subjects and therefore an active constituent of organization in both local and extra‐local settin…
Contributions to a Post-Sovereigntist Understanding of Law
This article proposes an understanding of law that goes beyond the popular association of law with sovereignty, constitutionalism and representative political institutions. By drawing on insights provided by the law as governance and `non-essentialist version of legal pluralism' approaches, the focus is on retrieving the specificity of plural legal and normative ordering strategies. The law as governance approach proposes a modest role for law wh…
Democracy, Society and the Governance of Security
Media, communication and the establishment of public camera surveillance programmes in Canada
Throughout Europe and North America, policing services, government agencies and private-sector interests have turned increasingly to open-street closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance to address crime, fear of crime and perceptions of social disorder. Although recent scholarly contributions have displaced the traditional explanatory reliance on the panopticon with mechanisms of consumer seduction, ‘post-panoptic’ insights into the establis…
On the Social Relations of Research
Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience and examines how textual sequences coordinate consciousness and ruling relations. This article explicates some of the shortcomings of IE, so future institutional ethnographers can work with these. I offer a critical assessment of IE, focusing on its ontology of the social and the issue of truncation, the constitutive her…
Mode of Production versus Mode of Information
While postmodernists hurriedly negate any theories affiliated with the Enlightenment, this paper argues that Karl Marx's prescient analyses of the capitalist mode of production are still fruitful for informing transformative politics. Although questions remain as to the efficacy of Marx's work for theorizing history and the role of the subject, we should not let the freedom of Marxism that ensued after his life mar the great importance of his cri…
Hunting for Harm
Le Programme de ramassage des aiguilles d'Ottawa a été développé dans le but de ramasser les seringues jetées par les usagers du service d'échange d'aiguilles de la Ville d'Ottawa. Les ramasseurs d'aiguilles sont, eux-mêmes, impliqués parfois dans les activités de la rue ou encore des anciens utilisateurs de drogues injectables. Tandis que les mesures visant la réduction des méfaits cherchent à contrer les discours moralisateurs à propos des util…
Comack Elizabeth Out There/In Here
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Sporting Girls, Streetwalkers, and Inmates of Houses of Ill Repute
This article examines the mutability of symbolic sanctions- or stigmas-applied to sex industry work by examining newspaper narratives in one medium-sized Canadian city over two time periods: 1870-1910 and 1980-2004. The article's purpose is first to get a sense of what the authors call the ecology of stigmas-their relation to the temporal and spatial contexts in which they are produced-and second to give needed historical context to them and the …
Ottawa’s National Capital Commission Conservation Officers and the Policing of Public Park Sex
The National Capital Commission (NCC) is an organization responsible for so-called ‘beautification’ and land development around Canada’s capital city, Ottawa. This paper examines surveillance of public sex by NCC conservation officers in Ottawa’s parks. Conceptualizing NCC conservation officer work as policing, I analyze conservation officer occurrence reports obtained through federal-level access to information requests to examine how public mal…
Their Risks Are My Risks
This paper builds in two ways on previous sociological studies concerning how people experience risk. Firstly, we discuss how risk is experienced in shared or altruistic ways as concern for others, and thus how emotions regarding risks produce solidarity. Secondly, we consider in particular how the others for whom one becomes concerned are not always people, and are sometimes instead companion animals such as cats and dogs, thus expanding the ana…
Intelligent Control
CCTV Surveillance and the Civic Conversation
The captivating idea of ‘public sociology’ has recently been debated across the social sciences. Although the debate has raised significant questions about the status of sociological knowledge production, insufficient attention has been devoted to thinking about how sociologists concretely enter into a civic conversation through the research process. Addressing this gap in the public sociology literature, we present partial findings from a Canada…
Problematizing Carceral Tours
Tours of operational prisons and jails have been advocated by some academics as one way of conducting observational research inside carceral institutions and have also been employed as a university-level pedagogical tool for teaching students about the realities of imprisonment. Though the merits of carceral tours as a knowledge-producing practice have been discussed in criminology and related social scientific disciplines, accounts of their limi…
In Conversation with the American Sociological Association President
Randall Collins est professeur de sociologie à l'University of Pennsylvania et Président de l' American Sociological Association . Dans cette entrevue, R. Collins parle de la sociologie des émotions, de la tradition interactionniste ainsi que de la violence. L'entrevue permet de situer les contributions de Collins dans le développement contemporain de la sociologie critique et la microsociologie interactionniste. Randall Collins is Professor of S…
The rise of biocriminology
Revisiting the contributions of numerous foundational biocriminological works, this article uses the concept 'bodily economies' to analyze the emergence and solidification of criminological pathologizations of the bios dependent on the capture and analysis of human corporeal matter. The scholars we discuss (Lombroso, Ellis, Goring, Hooton, and the Gluecks) each causally equate some part of the body with inbuilt criminality. Through an exegesis of…
Interviews as encounters
Few qualitative sociologists have considered how men who have sex with men hold diverse understandings of sexuality and how these matter in research encounters, especially as it regards 'touchy' interview topics such as intimacy, intercourse and men's bodies. Drawing from transcripts and field notes concerning my experiences of interviewing 30 male-for-male internet escorts in Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto (Canada), Houston and New York (USA), as wel…
The polysemy of punishment memorialization
Contributing to debates about cultural representations of prisons and prisoners, as well as exploring the crossover between the dark tourism literature and cultural criminology, this article reflects on how penal museums in the province of Ontario, Canada, create and communicate meaning as it regards imprisonment and punishment. Drawing from field notes made after observations at penal museums located in central and eastern Ontario cities and tow…
Blood Donation and Institutional Trust
This article examines the process of rebuilding institutional trust in the Canadian blood system in the aftermath of the tainted blood scandal. Our focus is the policy of lifetime deferral from donating blood for men who have sex with men. Drawing on findings from interviews with representatives of Health Canada's Expert Advisory Committee on Blood Regulation, the National Liaison Committee, Canadian Blood Services, and blood consumer groups, we …
Political science (114 works) · Sociology (110 works) · Law (91 works) · Law (61 works) · Criminology (48 works) · Public relations (41 works) · Psychology (36 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (34 works) · Computer Science (32 works) · Politics (32 works)