Meet the Team
Dale Spencer
Carleton University
Dale Spencer is a Settler Scholar and an Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. He has published mainly in the areas of youth studies, violence and victimology. On these topics he has published in such journals as British Journal of Criminology, Punishment and Society, Body and Society, Crime, Law and Social Change, Contemporary Justice Review, International Review of Victimology, International Journal of Drug Policy, Critical Criminology, Criminal Law and Philosophy, and Journal of Youth Studies. He is the author of Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment (2011 Routledge), co-author with K. Foster of Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives (UBC Press), and co-editor with K. Walby and A. Hunt of Emotions Matter (University of Toronto press) and co-editor of Fighting Scholars (Anthem press) with R.Sanchez-Garcia.
He has two major research projects currently underway. First, he is engaged in a multi-phased qualitative research project involving interviews with homeless males in urban centres in Canada and the United States. This project is focused on their experiences of violence and victimization while living on the streets, their oft problematic interactions with the police, and the complex ways in which they survive under brutal conditions engendered by neoliberal capitalism. Second, he is co-investigator on a project entitled “Creating ‘best practice’ for policing youth: Discovering, re-evaluating, re-shaping and reviving hope for youth desistance through changing relational dynamics between youth and police, a bottom-up and top-down process” with Rose Ricciardelli (principal investigator, Memorial University), Mike Adorjan (University of Calgary), Laura Huey (University of Western Ontario), and Nicole Powers (Memorial University). This project involves surveys, focus groups and interviews with so-called at-risk young people and members of the RCMP in Newfoundland and Labrador to understand the complex dynamic between these two groups.