Andrew Woolford

• SOC 2510 - Criminology
• SOC 3310 - Theorizing Crime, Law, and Social Justice
• SOC 3700 - Sociology of Law
• SOC 3850 - Restorative Justice
• SOC 3860 - Genocide, Crime, and Society
• SOC 4490 - Criminology, Violence, and Society

I am Department Head and Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba. I am also an Emeritus of the College of the Royal Society of Canada, Fulbright Scholar and former President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. 

My research program focuses on themes of power, resistance, justice and destruction. The questions I ask are quite simple, whether I am investigating Indigenous genocide in North America, reparations, inner city neoliberalism or the practices of restorative justice – in what ways do structures of power limit the possibilities of justice in the face of social inequality and injustice? How do individuals and groups resist the imposition of this power? And how might we pursue a justice that transforms the conditions that make injustice possible? I am an engaged scholar, committed to both scholarly excellence and community-based research. 

My recent work has focused on two community-based research projects with residential school Survivors: 1) Embodying Empathy, which designed, built and tested a virtual Indian Residential School that will serve as a site of knowledge mobilization and empathy formation; and 2) Remembering Assiniboia, which fostered commemoration of the Assiniboia Residential School. At present, I am also working on a project on human and more-than-human relations within genocidal processes under the title “symbiogenetic destruction.”

• PhD (Sociology), University of British Columbia, 2002
• MA (Sociology), University of Western Ontario, 1996 
• BA (Honours) (Sociology), University of Victoria, 1993

Research interests

• Genocide studies
• Residential schools and assimilative education
• Settler colonial studies
• Informal justice and conflict resolution

Research summary

I engage in critical genocide research that interrogates euro-centric and colonial elements of international law while simultaneously striving to prevent and halt group destruction. I also conduct research on the promise and perils of restorative justice as it is practiced in the criminal justice system in Canada. 

Research affiliations/groups

• Acting Director - Assiniboia Residential School Legacy Group
• Researcher - Manitoba Research Alliance
• Member - Consortium on Bigotry and Hatred
• Academic Board Member - Zoryan Institute

Selected books

• Andrew Woolford and Amanda Nelund. 2019. "The Politics of Restorative Justice: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition." Fernwood Publishing (243pp.).
• Andrew Woolford. 2015. “This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide and Redress in North America" co-published by the University of Nebraska, Indigenous Education Series and the University of Manitoba Press (448pp.). 

Selected edited volumes

• Survivors of the Assiniboia Indian Residential School. 2021. "Did you See Us? Reunion, Remembrance and Reclamation at an Urban Indian Residential School." Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. 
• Andrew Woolford and Jeff Benvenuto (eds.). 2017. "Canada and Colonial Genocide." Milton, UK: Routledge.
• Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Hinton (eds.). 2014. "Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America." Durham: Duke University Press.

Selected journal articles

• Andrew Woolford, David B. Macdonald, Adam Muller, Struan Sinclair, and Katherine Starzyk. 2022. “Enacting Empathy: Negotiating a Virtual Indian Residential School.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 18(3): 412–423. 
• Andrew Woolford. 2022. “’To make it belong to who I was, to who I became:’ Atom Egoyan’s Ararat and Symbiogenesis among the Diaspora of the Armenian Genocide.” American Review of Canadian Studies 52, 1: 29-45. 
• Andrew Woolford, Wanda June, and Um Sereyvothny. 2021. “’We Planted Rice and Killed People:’ Symbiogenetic Destruction in the Cambodian Genocide.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 15 (1): 44-67.
• Andrew Woolford and James Gacek. 2016. “Genocidal Carcerality and Indian Residential Schools in Canada.” Punishment & Society 18(4): 400-419.
• Andrew Woolford and Jeff Benvenuto. 2015. “Introduction: Canada and Colonial Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 17 (4): 373-390. 

• 2022 - Mary Scorer Award for the Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher from the Manitoba Book Awards for Did you See Us? Reunion, Remembrance and Reclamation at an Urban Indian Residential School. 
• 2017 - Internationalization Award, Faculty of Arts, University of Manitoba.
• 2016 - Elected Member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.
• 2015 - Elected President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
• 2010 - University of Manitoba Rh Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship in the Social Sciences, University of Manitoba.

• Interview with ActiveHistory, January 10, 2022 
• Sean Carleton and Andrew Woolford, “Ignore debaters and denialists, Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples fits the definition of genocide,” The Conversation, October 25, 2021
• Podcast discussion with Morgan Fontaine: Did You See Us? Reunion, Remembrance, and Reclamation at an Urban Indian Residential School. April 2023, Episode 114, Society for the History of Children and Youth.