Michael Adorjan’s research while affiliated with University of Calgary and other places

In this article, we draw from 159 qualitative interviews with Canadian correctional officers (COs) exploring their experiences and attitudes regarding social media. We frame our study within the “synoptic” mode of surveillance and public visibility—referring to the many observing the few—impacting public safety personnel, exploring the perceived vulnerabilities of COs, including toward prisoners, management, the organization, and the public. We highlight recent research on COs, especially in the Canadian context, and review the synoptic surveillance implications of social media in society. Our findings highlight four interrelated areas: COs (sometimes lack of) awareness of Correctional Service Canada (CSC) policies regarding social media use; challenges they experience online; the central role of privacy; and strategies they use to manage challenges and maintain privacy, especially considering their role as public representatives. We conclude by discussing how the use of social media produces new vulnerabilities for COs in public spaces and suggest future directions for research and practices.

Surveillance plays several interrelated and essential roles in contemporary education. In the current article, we explore the understandings and experiences of educators related to surveillance; especially the 'vertical' surveillance 'from below' students themselves direct towards educators both inside and outside of the classroom (referred to as 'sousveillance'). We also explore the prudential 'intrapersonal' and reflexive surveillance undertaken by educators to align and adjust to the expectations of educator professionalization, including during educator training, especially in terms of their social media use and under a context of synoptic prudentialism in schools. Synoptic prudentialism refers to the reflexive actions and adjustments by individuals and organizations in response to an acute awareness of widespread social surveillance-the many watching the few. Educators noted risks posed by surveillance, including sources of potential harm, both personal and professional. Findings reveal that, reinforced by the legal scare stories encountered during educator training programs, educators feel overwhelmingly vulnerable to the potential sousveillance of students, and are receiving little advice beyond the requirement to 'be careful'. We explore educators' privacy management strategies in response, for example, in response to concerns over students capturing videos in the classroom where situations may be taken out of context. This prudential framework, moreover, may also be inhibiting educators' ability to conduct outreach with students to detect and respond to online mediated conflict and harm.

There is increasing recognition that correctional officers (COs) serve a crucial role in their work in relation to communications underpinning discretion, especially regarding interactions with prisoners. This article examines attitudes and perceptions among Canadian federal correctional officer recruits (CORs) regarding what they anticipate are the greatest challenges they will face as new COs. We examine these discussions through the framework of Goffman's dramaturgical model of face work, especially face work within the ‘total institution’ of prisons. Our findings centre on anticipated challenges of building rapport with prisoners, including the requirements to monitor one's demeanour and ‘face work’. Characterisations of prisoners as inherently manipulative factor into CO anticipations of interactional challenges. We also consider the role that ‘soft power’ has in facilitating CO‐prisoner rapport and trust, which, we argue, ultimately undergirds opportunities in prisons to facilitate prisoner social change and successful community reintegration and desistance from crime.

Policing research, still largely concentrated on urban contexts, is increasingly recognizing the unique features of police work in rural regions. Beyond notable differences such as lower overall levels crime and fewer (though more sporadically distributed) people, little is also known regarding rural police understandings and responses to online mediated harms, including relatively serious forms of cyberbullying, non-consensual ‘sexting’, and other forms of crime mediated online. Interviews with police officers (N = 42) here focus on their views regarding police work in response to cyber-mediated harm facing youth in rural and remote Atlantic Canada. Responses center on how rural regions play a role in mediating the nature of online conflict and police respond to such conflict. Officers highlight several related challenges, such as lack of parental support, and how some youth ‘define deviancy down’, referring to a lack of recognition regarding the harm caused by cyberbullying and non-consensual sexting (including issues related to the distribution of child pornography). Implications are discussed for research on rural policing where evidence-based practices remain lacking.

While many schools have gravitated away from an emphasis on ‘zero tolerance’ discipline, embracing a range of ‘restorative practices’ (RP), only a handful of empirical studies have examined how RP have been received by educators. Moreover, frameworks which embrace RP in the classroom often neglect newer forms of online-mediated conflict and harm (e.g., cyberbullying, ‘sexting’). The current study, drawing on 77 qualitative interviews with Canadian pre-service and practicing educators, examines their responses regarding the effectiveness of RP in response to online conflict and harm. Challenges include educator emotional burnout, pressures on popular teachers to run RP, and the need for resources and administrative support in RP or an external mediator. These challenges, we argue, are difficult to overcome without a whole school framework that helps to instill cultural commitments attending to the wider goal of repairing harm situated at the level of a school’s community.

This introduction serves to set the stage for a special issue of The American Sociologist, a festschrift in honour of the career and ongoing influence of Dorothy Pawluch. A festschrift is a collection of reflections in honor of a scholar, and this issue includes reflections of how Dorothy Pawluch came to inspire, through her teaching and supervisory guidance, a particular legacy that continues to inform her former students, their own students, and the wider academic community. The festschrift also includes papers which have the goal of advancing social problems theory and taking constructionism in new, exciting directions. As such, they are also geared to honor Dorothy’s career. While readers will no doubt be reminded by many of the contributors about the huge impact of Dorothy’s influential article, Ontological Gerrymandering, written with Stephen Woolgar, what also shines through are recollections of Dorothy’s kindness, altruism, and general decency.