University of Ottawa | Université d'Ottawa

Faculty Member, Criminology/criminologie

Other Affiliations: Queen's University, Canada, Sociology
Red Quill Books, Editorial Board

Assistant Professor of Criminology

About

Jon obtained his PhD in Sociology from Queen's University at Kingston in 2005. He worked with two internationally known scholars of corporate crime: his dissertation supervisor Frank Pearce (author of the influential, Crimes of the Powerful (1976), and reputed Durkheim scholar and social theorist) and Laureen Snider (well-known also for her feminist socio-legal scholarship). He holds an MA in Legal Studies from Carleton University where he worked with internationally known socio-legal theorist Alan Hunt. He also studied briefly for an MPhil in Humanities at Memorial University and completed undergraduate degrees at the University of Regina (in Human Justice) and Lakehead University (in Sociology). Prior to joining the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa he was a professor of sociology in the School of Social Sciences at York University (Toronto).

He is interested in social theory (esp. Foucault and Bourdieu) and epistemology (esp, critical realism) and works this through substantive areas within socio-legal studies and critical criminology. His work is primarily focused on governance, the concept as well as the process of regulation. He has edited (with Frank Pearce) and contributed to Critical Realism and the Social Sciences: Heterodox Elaborations (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and has published in numerous anthologies and journals including the British Journal of Criminology, Critical Criminology, the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and Current Issues in Criminal Justice.

Jon's recent book, Criminology, Deviance and the Silver Screen: the Fictional Reality and the Criminological Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), situates criminological theory within the broader tradition of social theory. It explores and explicates existing criminological theory and the practise of theorising. It argues for the pedagogical usefulness of the 'fictional reality', elaborated as an alternative to the dominant ‘history of ideas’ approach to theory, and illustrates how this can help promote within criminology a circumspect practice of constructing and operating concepts. A second project called, Inspecting Home Inspection, is in the planning and exploratory stage. This project is concerned with the adequacy of residential home inspection as a consumer protection mechanism, the criminogenic aspects of the field's organisation, and the "powers" of private inspection. In short the project concerns both the regulatory and methodological aspects of the industry.

Jon is currently a member of the editorial collective of Red Quill Books, an alternative and radical peer-review press (www.redquillbooks.com).

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