Academic & Applied Research

Justice systems, gender, (in)security, (in)equality

Academic

I passed my PhD viva at the London School of Economics in May 2024. My thesis, “‘All I Have to Say’: Epistemic oppression, agency, and structural power in the wake of reforms to gendered violence laws”, is currently embargoed but is available on request. From 2019 to 2024, my PhD was fully funded by the LSE Studentship in Gender, Peace and Security.

My thesis is a critical ethnography of security sectors in the wake of legal changes governing responses to gendered violence. It examines how gendered, racialised, and socioeconomic/classed-based forms of power outlive their formal structures. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, sustained feminist activism led to major changes to law and policy frameworks aimed at improving access and quality of justice for people affected by sexual violence. But in many jurisdictions, activism and subsequent legal changes led to higher rates of SGBV reporting, which coincided with plummeting rates of prosecution. Drawing from abolitionist criminal-legal scholarship, I reject the premise the prosecutions are a good measure of justice, while suggesting that the ways in which these cases fall apart, disappear, or are withdrawn may contain clues about the many “afterlives” of gendered, racialised, and classed forms of power in the wake of seemingly progressive legal changes. Through ethnographies of two criminal legal systems — one in Canada and one in Nigeria — I examine how hundreds of survivors’ testimonies are assessed for their credibility, and how these assessments inform how officials’ use their discretionary power to move a case forward, to slow it down, or close it altogether. I pay close to attention to how doubt “sticks” to some bodies and words more than others, and suggest that “old” forms of structural power persist in the interpretations of victim/survivor testimonies. The epistemological approach I develop explores how doubt functions when survivors report gendered violence — it looks at how structural power configurations like race, gender, and class manifest in credibility assessments that take place in criminal legal systems.

The thesis itself makes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to understanding how oppressive power configurations might outlive legal enforcement structures, while also remaining sensitive to moments when hegemonic reproduction appears to stall or break down. Through my ethnographies of victim/survivor self-help groups, I show how everyday forms of resistance and feminist experimentation on the margins of law can expose the “possible” within the “probable”. Even when their transformative potential is thwarted, I suggest these moments warrant greater scholarly attention as emergent sources of change.

During my PhD I worked part time as a Research Officer on the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub. Prior to joining the LSE I worked at the Global Justice Lab at the University of Toronto. Throughout my thesis I have worked as a research consultant as well as a freelance journalist.

Applied

I consult with organizations doing applied research and investigations in the fields of justice, security, and gender. My research products are always based on mixed methodologies, which typically involve detailed ethnographic work and interviews, as well as quantitative data collection and analysis. I am competent in OSINT techniques and the use of a programming language (Python) for quantitative research. I often use insights from data to inform my ethnographic work, and vice-versa.

I am available for research consulting throughout my PhD, am comfortable working in English and French, and have an intermediate working knowledge of Spanish.

Recent projects include:

  • Open-source investigations, conflict monitoring and information network mapping, and “influence operations”

  • Evaluating the effects of federal “consent decrees” in American police departments

  • Ethnographies of complaints processes for misconduct in security and justice institutions in the US and Canada

  • Developed justice sector evaluation frameworks in collaboration with the Office of the Vice President, Nigeria

  • Developed evaluation frameworks for remand and court effectiveness in the Lahore High Court, Pakistan

  • Researched and contributed to transformative justice programming and impact research in Toronto and New York City

Select reports and presentations:

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Writing