2026 Grad Student Conference: State Violence & the Governance of (Dis)Order

The Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto is pleased to invite graduate students to the 2026 Annual Graduate Student Conference! This year's theme is State Violence and the Governance of (Dis)Order.

The 2026 Graduate Student Conference aims to explore how states produce, justify, and manage violence to achieve security and control. Importantly, the Conference will facilitate the critical examination of political, social, and historical mechanisms through which order is constructed and whose lives, movements, or claims are labelled (dis)orderly.

By bringing together attendees with diverse methods and perspectives, the Conference hopes to foster dialogue, challenge dominant narratives, and generate new insights into the relationships between those with and without power and explore the institutional practices that shape and justify state violence to maintain governance over those who challenge or threaten these systems of power.

The Conference is an excellent opportunity for Ph.D. and advanced M.A. students to share research broadly related to this theme and receive feedback from their peers. The Conference Committee welcomes submissions from criminology, sociolegal studies, sociology, law, psychology, history, science and technology studies, anthropology, public policy, geography and related disciplines. Applications should be submitted using the online form.

Topics

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Theories of order and disorder, and how states define deviance and the legitimacy of state violence.
• Security as a technology of governance.
• Comparative histories of the policing of counterinsurgency across empires and postcolonial states.
• State formation and the institutionalization of violence in colonial and settler-colonial contexts.
• The expansion of carceral logics beyond the Pr*son to control and manage problematic populations.
• Predictive policing of (dis)order and digital forms of surveillance.
• Militarization of police forces to control (dis)order.
• Racialized and gendered dimensions of state violence.
• State responses to protest, civil disobedience, and grassroots organizing.
• Citizenship stripping, deportability, and the governance of mobile populations.
• Discourses around immigration that produce (dis)orderly subjects.

Submission deadline: December 29, 2025, at 11:59 p.m.

Registration opens: December 15, 2025

Notification of selection: January 12, 2026

Conference date: March 26, 2026

Please note that our Centre Lounge and CG 265 seminar room are on the second floor of the Canadiana Gallery building, with stair access only as there is no elevator. If you have any access needs or if there are any ways we can support your participation in this conference, please email [email protected] and we will be glad to work with you to make the appropriate arrangements.

Photography, audio, and video recording may occur throughout this event. Therefore, by attending, you hereby authorize the University of Toronto to take your photograph, video and/or record your voice and grant the university all rights to these sounds, still or moving images in any medium for educational, promotional, marketing, advertising or other such purposes that support the mission of the university. If you do not consent to this, please speak with a university representative upon your arrival.

By transit: The closest subway station is Queen's Park via Line 1 or St. George via Line 2.

By car: There is no on-site parking available. There is a drop-off area at the main entrance. U of T hosts several parking lots on campus.

Please, direct all questions to [email protected].

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Host or Publisher Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies