Publics and Social Justice

Watch Now: Why Canada Needs a Basic Income Guarantee

Amid soaring costs of essentials, could a basic income guarantee be the game-changer? Both the market economy and welfare system are falling short, with minimum-wage workers, and people receiving social assistance trapped thousands of dollars below the poverty line....

Watch Now: Reflections on Sport, Community and the Chatham Coloured All-Stars with Miriam Wright

The Chatham Coloured All-Stars, a Black baseball team from Chatham, Ontario was among a number of Black teams that joined white-dominated amateur leagues in the 1930s. The All-Stars developed a high profile in southwestern Ontario baseball over their eight years...

A Reading Week Trip to Michigan State University

Laurier students pose by a mural in Flint, Michigan during a city tour, part of their visit to Michigan State University's East Lansing and Flint campuses. The mural depicts (from left) the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, James Forman, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev....

Free of the Prejudices that Restrain Them: Reflections on the Stories of Canadian Children and their Childhoods

In this article, Cynthia Comacchio examines the historical shifts in children’s experiences of childhood in Canada from Confederation to the 1970s. Comacchio further explores the sociocultural history of children and their childhoods in Canada in her forthcoming book,...

Watch Now: Critical Histories of Blackness in Canada: R v. R.D.S.

This talk explores R v. RDS twenty years after this landmark legal case in Canada. A number of legal scholars and historians of Black Canadian history and Black Canadian legal history have taken the opportunity presented by this anniversary to reflect upon its...

Watch Now: Charter Rights and the Encampment Ruling

In the first ruling of its kind in Ontario, on 27 January 2023 the Ontario Superior Court of Justice found that the Region of Waterloo’s attempt to evict encampment residents at 100 Victoria St. N was a violation of Charter rights (CV-22-717). Moderated by Laura Pin,...

Mapping the Cold War

This past August, The Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum, hosted the SSHRC funded symposium “Mapping the Cold War: The Spatialization of Preparedness,” in collaboration with The Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada (LCSC). This interdisciplinary workshop brought...

Welcome to the Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada

The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies (LCMSDS), which has become one of Canada’s largest military history research centres since its founding in the early 1990s by Terry Copp and Marc Kilgour, is now expanding to become the Laurier Centre...

Introducing the Copp Scholars Program!

One of the flagship initiatives of the Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada is the Copp Scholars Program. Named after one of its founding directors—Terry Copp—and in the spirit of his commitment to cultivating research and learning opportunities for his students,...

Ring Around the Maple

Settler Childhoods in English Canada, 1850 to 1975 By Cynthia Comacchio Children play on the streets in “The Ward,” a predominantly immigrant working-class neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, 1911 [City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 8029] My current project,...

Recent Posts

A Reading Week Trip to Michigan State University

Laurier students pose by a mural in Flint, Michigan during a city tour, part of their visit to Michigan State University's East Lansing and Flint campuses. The mural depicts (from left) the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, James Forman, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev....

Canada is being called on to engage critically with our collectively held notions of citizenship, publics and belongings as one step toward ensuring social justice for diverse populations. The Publics and Social Justice Research Collective fosters research, education, and cross-disciplinary discussion and collaboration on historical and contemporary inequities as these inform our diverse experiences of belongings, both local and national, while also complicating the notion of belonging itself.

This cluster’s researchers conduct multi-/inter-disciplinary research in a wide variety of areas including Indigenous settler-relations and histories, feminism and the politics of decolonization, reproductive and environmental justice, critical security studies, memory and visual culture, religious and diasporic identities and belongings, Black Canadian cultural production, immigration and refugee policy and citizenship, citizenship education, Caribbean religions in transnational contexts, African diaspora, religion and migration, gendered violence,  gender and diversity studies.

Publics and Social Justice Events

There are no upcoming Publics and Social Justice events at this time.