Jeffrey Ian Ross's Blog

Living beside a used car lot can teach you about noise, boundaries, and the limits of goodwill.

Years ago, I lived in a low-rise apartment in Toronto’s Little Portugal, right next to a small lot that sold used cars. Most of their customers were newcomers buying their first vehicle, and the salesmen hustled hard. But as neighbors, they could be… challenging.

They’d rigged the office phone to a loudspeaker outside so they wouldn’t miss calls while working the lot. Too often, they forgot to switch it off at night. We’d hear the ringing phones and fragments of messages people left long after midnight.

Friends, relatives, and former customers who were passing in front of the business would sometimes slow down (disrupting the traffic flow) and honk as they drove by. And sometimes salesmen, friends, and customers would attempt to burn rubber on the small lot in noisy and smoky displays of bravado. It was a mixed-use neighborhood, after all, but the line between liveliness and disruption blurred fast.

Occasionally, someone would steal a car. One night, under the overpowering security lighting on the lot, my neighbors and I watched a man jack up a vehicle and remove the entire transmission. I’m sure the owners had insurance, but each theft still meant paperwork, deductibles, and hassle.

The police would occasionally make the rounds, knocking on doors to ask if we’d seen anything. There was always a polite chorus of “no,” and plenty of feigned surprise.

The truth is, we saw plenty. If the car lot owner and crew had been better neighbors, if they’d kept the noise down, turned off the loudspeaker, shown a little consideration, we might have looked out for them.

But they didn’t, and we didn’t. The boundary between tolerance and indifference had long since been crossed.

I eventually moved away. In time, both the apartment building and the car lot fell to the developer’s wrecking ball, and with them, the noise.

The post The Used Car Lot Next Door appeared first on Jeffrey Ian Ross.

Ever since the emergence of contemporary graffiti and street art, the surfaces where it has been applied and the methods by which it has been disseminated have evolved.

In New York City, for example, graffiti writers began by tagging and bombing walls in their neighborhoods but eventually expanded to similar surfaces in different parts of the city.

Soon thereafter, writers started “getting up” in subway stations, tunnels, and cars. When graffiti was placed on the outside of trains, it enabled writers to go “all city.”

This activity, along with the places where graffiti appeared, morphed into freight and passenger trains, which helped disseminate the writers’ work across regions, the country, and in some cases, internationally.

Along the way, other mobile surfaces like box vans and delivery trucks were increasingly hit.

The shift from static walls to means of transportation introduced a crucial idea: mobility could serve as a medium, expanding both the audience and reach of graffiti and street art.

Now, in the contemporary city, dockless bikes and scooters are increasingly becoming sites for graffiti and street art.

Stickers and tags placed on these mobile platforms extend the same logic that animated early train graffiti: visibility through circulation.

This evolving relationship between graffiti/street art and urban mobility reveals how writers and artists continually adapt to changes in society to keep their work in motion and in public view.

That being said, it’s important to acknowledge that not only do surfaces present opportunities, but they also present constraints. In the case of bikes and scooters, the size is small, and because of the construction, certain types of graffiti and street art are better suited. Thus, in many cases, stickers may be the easiest to apply.

So what?

This development matters primarily for its cultural significance, technological relevance, and political communication.

First, mobile graffiti/street art challenges the static, property-based logic of the city. It asserts presence where the writer/artist might otherwise be excluded.

Second, by targeting new mobility systems (e.g., bikes and scooters), graffiti and street art are increasingly part of the digital economy and the so-called “smart city.” It turns corporate tools of efficiency into carriers of unregulated expression.

Third, this mobility transforms both authorship and audience. Finally, by using shared mobility platforms as canvases, artists reclaim space in a city increasingly privatized by technology companies. It is a subtle, yet potent, form of resistance.

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The drive to the Johnston farm, one of my father’s clients, always felt long, but the visits were mostly fun and always an adventure. The place had the basics: a farmhouse, a barn, a silo, cows, pigs, and at least one dog. When my father consulted with Mr. Johnston and my mother, if she came along, chatted with Mrs. Johnston, my older brother, sister, and I would play in the barn, sometimes with the Johnston boy.

The barn was the best part. To my ten-year-old eyes, it was enormous.  On each side of the main floor were haystacks and baled hay. We spent what seemed like hours playing tag in the maze-like tunnels built into the haystacks or swinging from a rope tied to the rafters and letting go into piles of hay. Below the floor were stalls with pigs and cows; they were ridiculously loud and aggressive.

But on one visit, my brother and sister weren’t there. While my parents talked inside the house, the Johnston boy, barely a teenager, asked me if I wanted to join him outside to survey the property. Just before we stepped out, he picked up a rifle, and I thought nothing of it.

After a short walk, we came to a clearing and spotted a small dog sitting upright in the distance. The boy said it had been there for a few days and hadn’t moved. He added that the dog was not theirs and was trespassing. He also said that the animal must probably be lame. His words tumbled out quickly, as if rehearsed.

Then, without pause, he leveled the rifle to his shoulder. The Johnston boy looked down the barrel and aimed. A crack split the air. The dog toppled. Silence. He turned, as if nothing had happened. We left the body where it lay.

It was the first time I had seen a defenseless animal killed so casually. Alone and unsettled, I said nothing, out of shock, maybe fear. Perhaps he wanted to impress me. Maybe it was something darker. I never told my parents, but the brazen suddenness of that act has been an enduring memory for me.

Author’s Note: “Johnston” is a pseudonym

Photo Credit:

Photographer: Stan Shebs

Title: Farm in the Kitchener area of Ontario

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In most urban settings, a sense of belonging is an important foundation for political participation. Political participation (also referred to as political engagement/mobilization) includes actions that are designed to express, claim, maintain, or expand individual and community justice, legitimacy, or power. And by belonging, I’m not simply talking about attachment, social connection, or loyalty, but about a deep feeling in which place and space are integral to personal identity and meaning.

These distinctions matter. While connection to a place can be instrumental, and loyalty may be strategic, belonging implies an affective and positive bond. Such attachment often affects/motivates a person’s desire and capacity to perceive and articulate grievances when a block, neighborhood, district, or city is threatened.

Admittedly, the causal relationship between belonging and political mobilization is not straightforward. In some cases, political engagement emerges from experiences of exclusion or displacement, where the absence of belonging generates claims to recognition and rights. Furthermore, belonging also operates unevenly across spatial areas. For example, what it means to belong to a block differs from what it means to be attached to a city, and how people respond in the political sphere may vary based on the attachment they feel for each different geographic entity.

These dynamics are also shaped in part by the quality and duration of social interactions. Sustained and positive encounters with neighbors, local workers, businesses, or community organizations tend to reinforce belonging, while recurrently negative or conflictual interactions (including criminal victimization) may erode it. Thus, belonging is not fixed but continually produced and contested in everyday urban life.

Expressions of belonging take multiple forms. Material practices such as home-making, memorialization, or the use of streets and public spaces can demonstrate attachment to place. Informal street-level symbolic markers often connected with street culture (e.g., graffiti, street art, etc.) may signal identification in visible ways. Institutional practices, such as branded signage, neighborhood newsletters, or city-sponsored campaigns, attempt to inscribe belonging into the urban landscape. Belonging can even manifest in less direct actions, for example, in the maintenance of civility, norms of cleanliness (e.g., cleaning the sidewalk in front of your residence or business), or everyday restraint (i.e., treating others with respect).

Although visible signs of identity can indicate attachment, they can also be performative or commodified branding detached from durable commitment.

            In DC, where I live, belonging is demonstrated in lots of different ways, including displaying the DC flag on porches, murals, bumper stickers, clothing, and tattoos. Similarly, the 202 area code is placed on local clothing brands like District of Clothing, One Love Massive, and Made in the District that sell shirts, hats, and hoodies with neighborhood names (e.g., “Brookland,” “Petworth”). We also see slogans like “Don’t Mute DC” placed on this type of clothing.  The “Taxation Without Representation” license plate encapsulates a widely shared grievance and serves as a civic identifier. DC has numerous neighborhood murals, paying homage to well-known homegrown music greats like jazz great Duke Ellington in Shaw to or the grandfather of Go-go, Chuck Brown. Bands often “rep” their neighborhood during performances. The “Don’t Mute DC” movement (2019) defended neighborhood cultural expression when Central Communications, a Metro PCS store in Shaw, was told to stop playing Go-go on speakers. Block parties, cookouts, and Go-go shows often double as neighborhood identity affirmations. Events like Adams Morgan Day or the H Street Festival showcase neighborhood pride while attracting visitors. Meanwhile, graffiti and street art may contain neighborhood names, abbreviations, or slang.

Yet markers of identity do not automatically translate into political action. Wearing a shirt with the name of the neighborhood on it or displaying a city flag does not guarantee that an individual will sign a petition, attend a protest, or join a boycott. The key issue is whether attachments to place channel grievances into collective political mobilization, and what kinds of actions are residents willing to engage in. Where belonging is absent, grievances may remain diffuse, limiting the scope for individuals and communities’ claims for justice, legitimacy, or claims to power.

All being said, belonging is a start.

Photo Credit

Title New York, New York. Children escape the heat of the East Side by using fire hydrant as a shower bath (1943).

Photographer: Smith, Roger

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Parking, often treated as a mundane logistical concern, is an important site of contestation in urban life. At its core, it reflects the struggle over public space in cities, where demand routinely exceeds supply.

Although debates about cars usually focus on externalities like emissions or their dominance over other modes of urban mobility, vehicles need to be stored, and drivers who use their vehicles in a city expect space to be available. Yet such spaces are typically scarce and therefore valuable. Municipalities attempt to impose order (and generate revenue) through ordinances, signage, enforcement, and fines, which reflect broader priorities about whose mobility matters.

Parking regulation, then, is more than bureaucratic management; it is an exercise of state power that structures everyday mobility and privileges certain users (e.g., residents, commuters, or commercial actors) over others in certain spaces, during particular times.

But urban order does not flow only from law. Informal norms shape behavior: whether a departing driver “owes” a space to someone waiting, how long it is acceptable to double-park, or whether putting a chair in a snow-cleared space is legitimate. Such practices reveal how everyday interactions generate micro-negotiations (and aggressions) of entitlement and authority. They demonstrate that order is continually produced and contested at the street level, not simply imposed from above.

Conflicts over towing, double-parking, or “space-saving” further highlight how residents and drivers attempt to assert claims over scarce resources, sometimes in defiance of official rules. These disputes expose tensions between formal regulation and lived practice, linking the politics of parking to broader questions of urban justice, governance, and the “right to the city.” The questions over who gets access to public space, what types of space, under what conditions, and under what terms are dominant in this exercise.

Ultimately, parking is not a mundane logistical issue but a microcosm of broader urban struggles over the distribution of rights, the allocation of resources, and the contestation of urban space itself.

Photo credit:

Title: Improptu Parking Sign Washington, D.C.

Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.

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A little over two weeks ago, Sean Charles Dunn, a 37-year-old paralegal, who has since been fired from the United States Department of Justice, hurled a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent on 14th Street in Washington, D.C.

The video of the incident spread quickly, and media coverage followed a predictable script: playful headlines, a few amusing commentaries, and a burst of memes that quickly circulated before the story faded out of the news cycle. The most striking cultural echo was a reworking of Banksy’s iconic street art piece, “Flower Thrower,” in which the protester was depicted hurling a sandwich instead of a bouquet.

But this framing misses a handful of important things.

Protest or Drunken Outburst?

At first glance, the episode appears to be nothing more than a drunken outburst. Dunn wasn’t leading a march, chanting slogans, and didn’t appear to be making a political statement. He seemed to be irritated and impulsive. From this angle, it’s understandable why the media framed the act as unserious.

Yet protest has always contained humorous and provocative elements. Think back to when activists cream-pied self-righteous politicians, business leaders, or cultural figures seen as hypocritical, powerful, or controversial. These acts mocked those in positions of power and knocked them off their pedestal just a tad. In this context, a pie in the face was never “just dessert.” It was symbolic resistance.

However, the sandwich event occupies an ambiguous space. On the one hand, it lacks the intentionality of satire. On the other hand, the state’s reaction has forced us to confront how fragile our current criminal justice system perceives itself to be when even a soggy hoagie is treated as a threat.

The Criminalization of Trivial Acts

Not only was Dunn arrested, but former Fox News host and current U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, suggested in a provocative video that Dunn would be charged with felony assault.

But law enforcement officers, especially those tasked with protest control, are trained to withstand far more than a flying sandwich. They routinely face bottles, eggs, and even rocks during demonstrations. To act as though a sandwich constitutes a serious projectile stretches credibility and makes cops (whether at the local or federal level) out to be whimps and the criminal justice system a joke.

More specifically, when the law treats a sandwich as a weapon, it elevates police fragility above common sense. This is not about public safety; it is about guarding the aura of authority. And the fact that federal prosecutors could not persuade a grand jury to approve a felony indictment means that the public is not buying any of this shit.

Media as Purveyors of Comic Relief

Back to the mainstream media. For its part, it chose the easy path: novelty and cuteness. A subway sandwich thrown at a cop? Perfect fodder for quippy headlines and viral sharing. It was framed as “cute,” an absurd blip in the daily churn. This trivialization also temporarily relieved the public of the burden of thinking about immigration enforcement overreach, protest policing, or the criminalization of minor acts. And it temporarily legitimized the charges by treating them as natural consequences of normal policing.

Why It Matters

We live in a time when public protest is increasingly criminalized. From bans on certain demonstrations to aggressive policing of even minor disruptions, the threshold for “threat” has sunk lower and lower. Why, just this week, a woman was arrested for spitting at a cop, and Pirro is also considering charging that person with felony assault.

It matters how we respond. In earlier eras, a pie in a politician’s face was understood as political theater, however unserious. It was disruptive, yes, but it was also a critique. Today, when every minor gesture can be weaponized and turned into a spectacle in the media, even the possibility of playful dissent is being squeezed out.

The Real Question

So, what is the proper takeaway from the sandwich thrower incident and how people and institutions responded to it?

Although it prompted some protesters to construct placards emblazoned with pithy slogans, and others to create and sell novelty t-shirts, we’ve yet to see a barrage of anti-ICE protesters arming themselves with subway sandwiches.

Dean’s action wasn’t a profound act of resistance.

And he does not deserve the designation of hero (despite the pun that tempts us to call him one).

Then again, we shouldn’t accept the popular narrative that Dean’s actions were meaningless. The episode shows how, during the Trump administration, the courts quickly want to criminalize minor acts, and how eagerly the press frames the acts as comical.

Meanwhile, neither entities act as if nothing bigger is at stake.

Until we grapple with these complementary issues, the next thrown sandwich, egg, or pie will be treated not as satire, not as politics, but as crime. And that should trouble us the most.

The post Rethinking the Subway Sandwich Guy Incident appeared first on Jeffrey Ian Ross.

Most of us move through cities on autopilot.

We commute, run errands, scroll our phones, and mentally prepare for the next task. It’s functional. But in the process, we miss more than the visual landscape of the city. We miss its soul.

The streets aren’t just spaces we pass through. They are living classrooms, stages, and laboratories. Every sidewalk interaction, graffiti tag, or street vendor’s setup is a signal, a small lesson in how people inhabit and adapt to urban life.

The Street as a Living Text

As Henri Lefebvre argued in Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, urban life has a rhythm that reveals itself when we slow down and pay attention.  These moments are not background noise; they’re signs, signals, and signification (i.e., semiotics).

Appreciating and understanding what is happening in these contexts helps build one’s street literacy: a skill in reading the city beyond maps or guides, but through the unspoken codes, impromptu interactions, and creative uses of space that define urban life. What happens when we treat street culture (a dominant element of urban life) not just as a style or a commodity but as a way of knowing?

Street Culture as Knowledge

From Sigmund Freud’s analysis of unconscious motivation to Michel de Certeau’s insights on how we navigate cities and bend the rules of modern life without even realizing it, scholars have studied “everyday life.” They’ve examined how media and pop culture shape our habits, values, and identities.

But most of these thinkers miss one crucial thing: the complex interactions among people who live, work, or access the street.

Street culture isn’t just graffiti, street art, fashion, or slang. It’s an entire ecosystem of informal rules, spatial tactics, survival strategies, and creative expression. From local kids skateboarding down alleys to unhoused people arranging sleeping spots, these actors navigate the city with an intelligence rooted in real experience.

Every interaction on the street, from the way a mural signals a neighborhood’s history to how a sticker or tag marks territory or ideas, is part of this living knowledge. Understanding it is like learning a language: once you notice the rhythms, cues, and codes, the city speaks to you differently.

Why This Matters Now

Understanding street culture isn’t just interesting, it’s increasingly important.

Post-pandemic cities (especially large global ones) are changing fast. Public spaces are being reshaped at lightning speed. Surveillance has expanded. Informal economies are under pressure. And gentrification is pushing out the very people who give neighborhoods (and the streets) their character and edge.

If we ignore street culture, we not only lose vital knowledge, but we also lose the chance to see the city from the ground up.

For most of my scholarly career, I’ve examined street culture (in one shape or form), but now is a time to develop a more thoughtful framework. I’m exploring how people create meaning in urban spaces, not just through organizations, institutions, or technologies, but through movement, adaptation, and shared, often unspoken codes. I argue that paying closer attention to the streets can deepen our connection to our cities and each other.

Because when we stop sleepwalking through the city, we start seeing it for what it is: a stage, a classroom, a home.

Photo Credit:

Photographer: Bego2good1

Title: The Hub – East 149th Street & 3rd Avenue in Mott Haven / Melrose, The Bronx

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It’s early afternoon, and I’ve just finished shopping for fresh fish and vegetables at Mercado San Martín. Now I’m standing at the bar of a small restaurant located deep in San Sebastián’s Old Town, eating txipirones en su tinta, a Basque dish of small squid cooked in its ink, and sipping a glass of house txakoli, the white wine from this region. Around me are the sounds of dishes clattering, wine bottles plunged back into ice buckets, and conversations in different languages. The air smells faintly of garlic, tomato, and fried food. I’ve returned to the Basque Country this summer for a month, but this time in San Sebastian.

There are a handful of reasons I came back, but one of the top ones on my list was to deepen my knowledge of Basque cuisine and improve my skills in cooking it properly. I’ve admired it’s blend of tradition, technique, and regional pride for years, but respect from a distance feels insufficient. In addition to cooking Japanese food (more specifically, Washoku), I cross-train in and want to master Comida Vasca. Slowly, yes, but seriously.

The appeal of Basque cuisine runs deep. It’s not just the Marmitako (fish stew) or the pintxos or the Chuletón (i.e., fire-grilled meats). It’s the variety of flavors, the regional variation, and, in my estimation, once you can cook Basque food, you can almost master any other. It’s how a dish can be both simple and impossibly technical, how a cider house dinner can feel like both a celebration and a history lesson.

Like my experience in Bilbao two summers ago, to immerse myself, I enrolled in a week-long Spanish class.  I’ve managed for years with broken Spanish, but it was time to move beyond survival mode. (Although Spanish isn’t the only language here. Euskera, the Basque language, is everywhere, from street signs to the hum of the market.)

Unfortunately, unlike my previous experience in 2023 when I took a week-long workshop at the Basque Culinary Center, it had closed for its summer break. (Welcome to August in Europe).

And like hell was I going to do one or more cooking classes with tourists (typically young couples and families with bored teenagers) that last a couple of hours and focus on completing pre-prepared and basic dishes. Been there, done that.

At one point, I seriously considered doing a stage (an unpaid internship) at a local Basque restaurant. But the idea of getting barked at in a foreign language (cuz I’m incredibly slow in food preparation and slightly deaf), while working on a book deadline (more about this later), gave me pause. 

So I turned the limitation into a challenge: learn as much as possible independently, shop and eat with intention, visit the markets, the highly ranked restaurants and pintxo bars, speak to and observe the people who work there, and the ones who visit, ask for recommendations, and push beyond my culinary comfort zone. For example, when I go to the market, I watch what locals purchase. I ask them why they are buying particular types of food, and how they are preparing it. Also, understand that certain types of food are in season throughout the year. At the beginning of July, for example, fish like Bonito del Norte and Sardines are in season, and both are served simply grilled.

To the extent possible, my days were like a ritual. I went to the market and purchased what I would prepare for one of our meals, then ate lunch or dinner, sometimes alone or with my wife at local joints, using these situations to study breadth, technique, and ingredient combinations. 

Since committing to this cross-training approach (a few years ago), I’ve become a relentless student. I’ve read cookbooks and articles, watched documentaries, taken notes, snapped photos, and pinned enjoyable and promising restaurants on Google Maps. Just like my practice with Washoku, I constantly try new recipes. These are typically dishes that I may have eaten somewhere but have never made. Part of this process involves trying to emulate the masters. 

At a sidrería, I watched cider poured from enormous barrels, caught mid-air in tilted glasses, a technique that aerates the cider and connects drinkers to centuries of tradition. The ritualistic precision fascinated me: the angle of the pour, the timing, the way the server never looked at the glass but somehow never missed.

Instead of formal instruction, I’m building skills and knowledge through sustained observation, deliberate practice, and immersion in context. Like an athlete improving their ability through different exercises, I’m developing my Basque cooking technique through study, ingredient usage and substitution, cultural exploration, and repetition. This method requires patience. The ability to excel at cooking Basque food, or any other cuisine, improves through sustained attention, the willingness to understand why certain combinations of ingredients work, how regional variations affect the end product, and what makes a perfect txuleta or a properly balanced salsa verde.

I’m learning that mastery in any cuisine (or activity) demands more than fidelity to a recipe. It requires understanding the culture that created the food, the ingredients that define it, and the techniques that are used. In the Basque Country, that means respecting both tradition and innovation, precision, intuition, and improvisation.

Curiosity, consistency, and humility are also important. That’s how I’m moving forward, one dish at a time.

Photo credit

Title: txerri txuleta (similar to a pork chuleta)

from https://www.instagram.com/adventuresi...

Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.

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Governments and private foundations spend considerable resources each year on prison education (i.e., courses in literacy, vocational skills, and higher education), believing they reduce recidivism and improve reentry success.

But outcomes vary widely. Some programs transform lives; others barely make a difference. The problem? We have little reliable evidence on which work, which fails, and why.

Small sample sizes, inconsistent metrics, and a narrow focus on single programs, facilities, or countries hinder most of this research.

The result is a patchwork of findings that offer little practical guidance for shaping policy or directing funding.

We can change that. A global database of correctional education programs and their outcomes would allow us to better compare results among programs and across borders, identify the most effective models, and adapt them to local contexts, while ending investments in approaches that don’t deliver.

It doesn’t require a billion-dollar grant. We could start small by crowdsourcing data from researchers, NGOs, and practitioners who are already tracking results. Over time, governments, international bodies, and foundations could fund and maintain the platform.

Right now, we build most correctional educational programs on hope and anecdote. With shared knowledge, we could ensure that our investments deliver measurable impact, maximizing education behind bars into one of the most powerful tools for rehabilitation the world has ever known.

Photo credit

Title: database

Photographer: Christophe Benoit

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Canada is often portrayed, by Canadians and outsiders alike, as a peaceable kingdom. A safe, polite, largely nonviolent country. Aside from a handful of gritty television series that have made their way out of Canada, the True North is generally depicted as an exceptional place to live, work, or vacation.

But thirty years ago, I set out to challenge one of those myths. At the time, I was living outside of Canada, in the United States, and I was struck by how pervasive the news coverage of violence was, and the adaptations people made as a response. I began to wonder: Why do Canadians behave as if they’re immune to the same dynamics? There’s plenty of violence in Canada, too.

That question became the seed for Violence in Canada: Sociopoltical Perspectives, a book I edited at the beginning of my academic career. Now, three decades later, it seems worth reflecting on the origins of the project, what it accomplished, and how the landscape has shifted since its publication.

What I Set Out to Do

At the time, I had several goals. Like many early-career academics, I was trying to build my academic street cred. But this wasn’t some cynical résumé-padding exercise. Violence in Canada was also a personal homage to my primary mentor, Ted Robert Gurr, who had co-edited the classic Violence in America with Hugh Graham. That book lasted through three editions, each expanding and evolving with new material. Gurr and Graham’s Violence in America didn’t just map patterns; it helped shape scholarly and national conversations about crime, protest, and power. I hoped Violence in Canada could do something similar. Gurr, graciously, agreed to write the foreword to Violence in Canada.

I also saw the book as a necessary intervention. The popular image of Canada as a haven from violence, not just physical violence, but structural and state violence, struck me as dangerously incomplete and disengenuous. I wanted to compile a volume that would push back against that complacency.

Building the Book

All books begin as a proposal, and Violence in Canada was no different. I shopped the idea around and received the most promising feedback from Oxford University Press Canada. I also invited academics whose work I respected to contribute chapters. Although I had a lot of energy, I was still ABD (all but dissertation) at the time, which probably didn’t help. I’m sure some contributors wondered who the hell I was. Nevertheless, I was truly blessed by having so many respected scholars who specialized in facets of violence in Canada agree to write chapters for the book.

In retrospect, I might advise early-career scholars to wait until after finishing their dissertations before writing a book or editing a volume. But what did I know? I was impatient and, as it turns out, fortunate.

Violence in Canada, and another project I was working on at the same time, Controlling State Crime, formed the foundation of my early publishing experience. Editing Violence in Canada taught me a lot about how scholarly books come together, and later, I would reflect on that process in a newsletter article and two peer-reviewed pieces.

Reception and Legacy

Originally published by Oxford, the book had a solid run. It received mostly positive reviews, was relatively well cited, and eventually went into a second edition.

Still, it wasn’t without criticism. Some activists argued that the book failed to address structural violence, a critique that I think would’ve been answered more clearly had they read both Gurr’s and my forewords. But the feedback was instructive, and I don’t dismiss it. Structural violence in Canada deserved more sustained engagement then, and it certainly does now.

One of the central arguments of the book was that much of the violence in Canada happens out of sight behind closed doors. And since the book’s publication, research has continued to validate that claim. Peer-reviewed articles, government reports, and NGO investigations have all helped uncover the less visible but deeply embedded patterns of violence in Canadian life.

Canada Today

In the three decades since the book’s release, the level of violence in Canada has fluctuated, much like in the United States. But overall, Canada still experiences less violence per capita. This isn’t accidental.

A combination of factors—stricter gun control laws, lower levels of poverty and inequality, and universal healthcare (including mental health services), have all played a role. That doesn’t mean we’re anywhere close to utopia. Ask a First Nations woman living on or near a reservation, or a street cop patrolling the inner city of Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, whether Canada is nonviolent. They’ll either laugh at you or stare at you in disbelief.

The myth of the peaceable kingdom isn’t dead and may never die.

But treating Canada as immune to the forces that produce violence elsewhere is more than naïve. It’s dangerous.

Looking Ahead

Violence in Canada was never intended to be the final word. It was a starting point, a provocation, and an attempt to push the conversation forward. Thirty years later, the book feels both dated and oddly prescient. Much has changed in terms of policies, practices, and laws, but arguably not enough.

Violence in Canada as a process didn’t begin with colonization, and it didn’t end with a book (even one that made its way into a second edition). The challenge remains: to ask hard questions about who gets hurt, how, and why, and to confront the myths some people cling to in the name of national exceptionalism.

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