Val Marie Johnson

Saint Mary’s University

Val Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Saint Mary’s University. She has been involved in anti-poverty work through organizations such as the Nova Scotia Poverty Reduction Strategy Coalition. Her teaching interests include how we govern the self, others, group dynamics, and social spaces and institutions. Val’s research has centered on women’s and men’s citizenship production through conflict over prostitution in late-19th and early 20th century New York City; how law, policing, “crime,” and their popular representation, are grounded in broader governance dynamics; and the history and theoretical relevance of Canadian youth justice law reform and liberal ideas and practices in the 1960s.

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  • Poverty, Regulation & Social Justice

    Readings on the Criminalization of Poverty

    Edited by Diane Crocker and Val Marie Johnson     April 2010

    Emerging from a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty, this volume critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and understands this regulation as part of the dynamics of liberal capitalism. Exploring issues such as homelessness, social assistance and single mothers, and written from a diversity of perspectives from academics to frontline workers, policy-makers and those affected first hand by these practices, this book aims to help readers imagine a more compassionate future.