Anita Lam
Biographic Data
| ID | 3984487 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anita Lam |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anita |
| FAMILY NAME | Lam |
| SIGNATURE | LAM A |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1561-270X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Sensing Toxic Injustice
The bodies of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls are often discovered at polluted sites in Winnipeg, Canada, including the Red River. Left at toxic sites that authorities deem environmentally dangerous, these women became untouchable in death, mired in sociocultural representations of disposability and wasting practices. We link murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls to the polluting effects of white settler colonialism espe…
Criminal anthroposcenes 2.0
While media attention has focused on the visceral brutality of police chokeholds, less noticed are the breath-taking effects of air pollution caused by the (in)actions of state agencies dedicated to environmental protection. To think through how race and racism are embedded in the processes that underlie the Anthropocene, I reframe three key terms of engagement to analyze with greater rigor contemporary criminal anthroposcenes (i.e. scenes consti…
A convergence of crises
Bunkerization, a term often associated with military fortifications on 20th-century battlefields or the fallout shelters of the Cold War, can now refer to the building, buying and selling of artificial environments designed to provide protective and defensive responses to the ecological, military, and political threats of the Anthropocene. As places of elite retreat, however, these are not spartan spaces. This article documents how—for some—forms…
Documenting Contact and Thinking with Skin
In contrast to quantitative studies that rely on numerical data to highlight racial disparities in police street checks, this article offers a qualitative methodology for examining how histories of anti-Blackness configure civilians’ experiences of present-day policing. Taking the Halifax Street Checks Report as our primary object of analysis, we apply an innovative dermatological approach, demonstrating how skin itself becomes meaningful when po…
Televisual waiting
As a massively popular crime drama, Crime Scene Investigation has circulated influential images and narratives that suggest that the processing and analysis of forensic evidence can be done in a swift and timely manner. The claim of such a CSI effect is based on the relative absence of waiting scenes within the series. This article examines the series' multiple representations of time and waiting, linking the absence of waiting to the constructio…
Under the Lucky Moose
In this paper, we use postcolonial theories of temporality—specifically the idea of belatedness—to examine how literal forms of lateness inform the so-called Lucky Moose case, wherein Chinese-Canadian grocer David Chen tardily performs a citizen’s arrest in Toronto. Canadian news media outlets, the Chinese-Canadian community, and R v Chen (2010) all contribute to the construction of Chen as an active legal subject, capable of working through the …
Making Crime Television
This book employs actor-network theory in order to examine how representations of crime are produced for contemporary prime-time television dramas. As a unique examination of the production of contemporary crime television dramas, particularly their writing process, Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast examines not only the semiotic relations between ideas about crime, but the material …
Chewing in the name of justice
The first issue of John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew was released in June 2009 by Image Comics at a time when the American comic book market was so dominated by stories written within the superhero genre that ‘comic books and superheroes [had] almost become synonyms’ (Rhodes 2008: 6). Within this superhero market, Chew was remarkably not a comic book about a superhero. Instead, Chew is a New York Times bestselling, Eisner award-winning series a…
A convergence of crises
Bunkerization, a term often associated with military fortifications on 20th-century battlefields or the fallout shelters of the Cold War, can now refer to the building, buying and selling of artificial environments designed to provide protective and defensive responses to the ecological, military, and political threats of the Anthropocene. As places of elite retreat, however, these are not spartan spaces. This article documents how—for some—forms…
Criminal anthroposcenes 2.0
While media attention has focused on the visceral brutality of police chokeholds, less noticed are the breath-taking effects of air pollution caused by the (in)actions of state agencies dedicated to environmental protection. To think through how race and racism are embedded in the processes that underlie the Anthropocene, I reframe three key terms of engagement to analyze with greater rigor contemporary criminal anthroposcenes (i.e. scenes consti…
Documenting Contact and Thinking with Skin
In contrast to quantitative studies that rely on numerical data to highlight racial disparities in police street checks, this article offers a qualitative methodology for examining how histories of anti-Blackness configure civilians’ experiences of present-day policing. Taking the Halifax Street Checks Report as our primary object of analysis, we apply an innovative dermatological approach, demonstrating how skin itself becomes meaningful when po…
Under the Lucky Moose
In this paper, we use postcolonial theories of temporality—specifically the idea of belatedness—to examine how literal forms of lateness inform the so-called Lucky Moose case, wherein Chinese-Canadian grocer David Chen tardily performs a citizen’s arrest in Toronto. Canadian news media outlets, the Chinese-Canadian community, and R v Chen (2010) all contribute to the construction of Chen as an active legal subject, capable of working through the …
Chewing in the name of justice
The first issue of John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew was released in June 2009 by Image Comics at a time when the American comic book market was so dominated by stories written within the superhero genre that ‘comic books and superheroes [had] almost become synonyms’ (Rhodes 2008: 6). Within this superhero market, Chew was remarkably not a comic book about a superhero. Instead, Chew is a New York Times bestselling, Eisner award-winning series a…
Making Crime Television
This book employs actor-network theory in order to examine how representations of crime are produced for contemporary prime-time television dramas. As a unique examination of the production of contemporary crime television dramas, particularly their writing process, Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast examines not only the semiotic relations between ideas about crime, but the material …
Under the Lucky Moose
In this paper, we use postcolonial theories of temporality—specifically the idea of belatedness—to examine how literal forms of lateness inform the so-called Lucky Moose case, wherein Chinese-Canadian grocer David Chen tardily performs a citizen’s arrest in Toronto. Canadian news media outlets, the Chinese-Canadian community, and R v Chen (2010) all contribute to the construction of Chen as an active legal subject, capable of working through the …
Televisual waiting
As a massively popular crime drama, Crime Scene Investigation has circulated influential images and narratives that suggest that the processing and analysis of forensic evidence can be done in a swift and timely manner. The claim of such a CSI effect is based on the relative absence of waiting scenes within the series. This article examines the series' multiple representations of time and waiting, linking the absence of waiting to the constructio…
Documenting Contact and Thinking with Skin
In contrast to quantitative studies that rely on numerical data to highlight racial disparities in police street checks, this article offers a qualitative methodology for examining how histories of anti-Blackness configure civilians’ experiences of present-day policing. Taking the Halifax Street Checks Report as our primary object of analysis, we apply an innovative dermatological approach, demonstrating how skin itself becomes meaningful when po…
Criminal anthroposcenes 2.0
While media attention has focused on the visceral brutality of police chokeholds, less noticed are the breath-taking effects of air pollution caused by the (in)actions of state agencies dedicated to environmental protection. To think through how race and racism are embedded in the processes that underlie the Anthropocene, I reframe three key terms of engagement to analyze with greater rigor contemporary criminal anthroposcenes (i.e. scenes consti…
A convergence of crises
Bunkerization, a term often associated with military fortifications on 20th-century battlefields or the fallout shelters of the Cold War, can now refer to the building, buying and selling of artificial environments designed to provide protective and defensive responses to the ecological, military, and political threats of the Anthropocene. As places of elite retreat, however, these are not spartan spaces. This article documents how—for some—forms…
Sensing Toxic Injustice
The bodies of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls are often discovered at polluted sites in Winnipeg, Canada, including the Red River. Left at toxic sites that authorities deem environmentally dangerous, these women became untouchable in death, mired in sociocultural representations of disposability and wasting practices. We link murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls to the polluting effects of white settler colonialism espe…
Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Criminology (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Environmental ethics (3 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (3 works) · Psychology (3 works) · Anthropocene (2 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (2 works)