James M. FitzGerald

Post-Doctoral Visitor, Department of Politics, York University

My name is Dr. James FitzGerald, and I am a Post-doctoral Visitor in the Department of Politics at York University. I live in Tkaronto (Toronto) in the Dish With One Spoon Territory, on the traditional territories of the Wendat, the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and the Treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

I received my PhD from York University in August 2022. I am interested in public complicities and collaborations with artists, grassroots organizations, and educational and Abolitionist collectives or groups.

I completed a Postdoctoral Visitor working on an Insight Development Grant titled, “Divide and Colonize? The “Core of Indianness” in labour law and Policy and Its Effects” (2021) in 2023. This work was part of a multi-university research team. This study examined the shifts in federally regulated employment standards and labour relations on reserve. The project unpacked how federal jurisdiction has been shaped by case law and how Indigenous unionization is impacted by contestations regarding federal, provincial, and Indigenous jurisdiction over labour rights.

I am currently a policy analyst and independent scholar.

My research and teaching emerge from the intersection of Canadian politics, settler colonialism, urban policy, and critical studies of institutions. A central concern of my work is how policies shape and reshape inclusions and exclusions within Canadian society across different historical periods while resisting attempts to reform or challenge entrenched systems of discrimination.

In my thesis, Governing Disappearance: Refiguring Canadian Responses to Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls, Iconsidered the broader political evasion strategies attempted by the Canadian state to obscure violence, block transformative change, and subvert grassroots projects and policies. I primarily focused on stereotypical assumptions within institutional responses that have not addressed underlying structural patterns and trends relating to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the evasion by the state of Indigenous constitutional and international Indigenous human rights.

More broadly, my research focuses on how development projects shape and reshape spaces, people(s), and perceptions of self around urban security, policing, social spending, and arrangements of citizenship, space, presence, and jurisdiction. My current research centres on how critical infrastructure and trade relationships are remaking Canadian institutions, labour relations, jurisdiction, and conceptions of citizenship.

Publications

Open Access Publications

FitzGerald, J. 2017. “The Killing Silence.” In Canada Watch, edited by Anna Hudson, Jennifer Mussell, Erin Yunes, and Laura Taman, 5–6.Toronto: Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies.

FitzGerald, J. 2015. “Truth without Reconciliation.” In The Harper Record: Volume Two, edited by Teresa Healy and Stuart Trew, 245–54. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Editorials in Newspapers + Journalism + Open Access

Teaching

My work contributes to critical discussions about Canadian nationalism, law, institutions, and policy around being and belonging in Canada. I investigate how citizenship is made and remade across different economic and social periods within Canadian politics by focusing on who is included, excluded, and implicated in producing contemporary political divisions between borders, subjects, and the material effects of people and power.

I take a decolonial and situated approach to my teaching and research within broader Political Science. My teaching and research reflect a commitment to thinkers, communities, and voices that have been historically excluded and remain underrepresented in the classroom and the academic community. I believe that by engaging with Indigenous, Black, Asian, and LGBTQ2I+ thought and contestations over what is political, the questions that affect students’ daily lives can be made more nuanced and historically situated.

I also value community-building, accountability, and play- and game-based approaches to engaging students in creative, thoughtful, and engaged learning. My pedagogical approach focuses on simulations, mock activities, and institutional roleplaying to understand how committees, institutions, the law, and Parliament operate.

Classroom Approach: I take an interest-based approach to learning, curriculum design, and research. I value consensus-based approaches to classroom learning and dialogue that focus on participant interests, debating and discussion, and building consensus. I prioritize thoughtful and engaged participation that allows students to see themselves in the portfolio of work they produce in my classroom. I aim to facilitate respectful and thoughtful discussions that build consensus, respect, and ownership over the interest-based course material they helped arrange.

I am prepared to teach foundational undergraduate course(s) in Canadian politics, Canada in the World, and Urban Politics in the Canadian and North American context.

Collaboration & Consulting

In my work and practice as a scholar, I attempt to build upon relations with communities and groups impacted by institutional failures and historical and ongoing formations of violence within the Canadian context. Building on my prior research, I attempt to leverage my strengths in archival research, knowledge mobilization, digital storytelling, infographics, and education to help support struggles for justice.

I am interested in building conversations across public, media, educational, and academic spaces that allow for a nuanced and critical discussion of public policy with policymakers and practitioners around complex and often contested conceptions of what is political.

As an academic, it is important for me to consider the extractive capacity of research. In my work, I seek to challenge this one-way flow of knowledge, practices, and resources away from communities. I seek to redirect this flow of knowledge extraction with participant action research, acts of restitution, return of knowledge, and co-creation of knowledge.

Under the guidance and direction of community or partners, I am open to building non-peer-reviewed publications, supporting community grant applications, conducting archival research, legal analysis, writing op-eds, and developing toolkits/reports alongside partners (such as policy briefs, handbooks, high-level analysis, process mapping, or informational narrative accounts of policy impacts) to support documentary and self-production of challenging stories.