Recent graduate Marianne Quirouette will be starting a new position as Assistant Professor of Criminology this January at the Université de Montréal. Marianne completed her dissertation, “Risks, Needs and Reality Checks: Community Work with Disadvantaged Justice-Involved Individuals”, in 2017 under the supervision of Professors Kelly Hannah-Moffat, Paula Maurutto and Phil Goodman. Her dissertation drew from 105 interviews and two years of fieldwork focusing on the governance of ‘complex-need’ clients who are criminalized and depend on services offered by practitioners in and out of the justice system. Her research showed that the production, sharing and use of risk knowledges helps community practitioners address a variety of objectives and interests. Knowledge produced to inform coordinated responses is simultaneously used to protect practitioners and to advocate for clients and push other stakeholders towards penal, judicial and social change. Marianne showed how community practitioners contribute to penal surveillance and risk management – even serving as de facto sureties – while also generating resistance and illustrating the value of social and medical evidence from outside criminal justice fields. She published this research in the Journal of Poverty and Theoretical Criminology, with other manuscripts in progress.
After defending her dissertation and graduating from the University of Toronto, Marianne received a Banting Post-Doctoral Fellowship to work with Marie-Eve Sylvestre in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. There she extended her doctoral research by beginning a project studying criminal defense lawyers. For this work, she has documented how [30] defense lawyers work with marginalized clients who have experienced past trauma and injustice and/or face complex and intersecting issues (e.g., homelessness, mental health, substance use). Her work examines if, when and how defence lawyers manage social and therapeutic needs ‘with’ community practitioners and how they use and contribute to and court narratives and practices while representing clients. As a sociologist, Marianne is documenting how lawyers negotiate practice management, and engage with other stakeholders to manage evidence and arguments about the legal relevance of social context. She will continue this work as she embarks on the next stage of her career as an Assistant Professor. At the Université de Montréal, she will teach criminology courses related to social justice, including a graduate seminar called (In)Justice and the Penal System. Working with her new colleagues, Marianne has joined the International Centre for Comparative Criminology (https://www.cicc-iccc.org/en ) and the Accessing Law and Justice research project (http://adaj.ca/home).