Ann De Shalit, a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Social Work, has received recognition from the Royal Society of Canada.
Ann De Shalit, a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Social Work, has received the 2024 Alice Wilson Award from the Royal Society of Canada.
The award recognizes women of outstanding academic qualifications in the arts and humanities, social sciences, or science who are entering a career in scholarship or research at the post-doctoral level. Dr. De Shalit was one of three academics recognized for their research.
De Shalit’s post-doctoral research, Safety for whom? A situational analysis of safe/r supply and the rhetoric of crime, social decline, risk, and unsafety, considers the political and media rhetoric framing Canada’s safe/r supply programming, a harm reduction measure that responds to rising rates of overdose and death from the unregulated toxic drug supply. The project explores impacts of misinformed rhetoric on program delivery and safety of harm reduction users and workers.
De Shalit’s mentor and post-doctoral supervisor is Adrian Guta.
“This is Dr. Guta’s area of expertise, and he has provided me with a great amount of support and guidance,” she says. “So, putting together his experience and some of my background, it comes together as a project that hopefully has some impact once it’s carried out.”
“When we consider the rhetoric around safe supply, its race and class dynamics are clear. That’s where the ethical and moral dilemmas appear in conservative leaning rhetoric. That’s when it changes to ‘unsafety’ and ‘danger’ and so on. It completely misleads the history and purpose of safe supply.”
Safe supply is not meant only to address fentanyl use, but that drug has brought the need to the fore.
“The evolution in rhetoric around fentanyl in particular is interesting — when I previously worked at a chronic pain medical clinic where we regularly prescribed fentanyl, the sentiment around unsafety and risk was not present. That’s because it was being distributed by pharmaceutical companies and prescribed by physicians. When safe supply now gets framed as a source of unsafety and crime, this context disappears. The rhetoric around safe supply has material impacts on people’s health and lives. It is not just an exercise in language,” she says.
To those who wonder about “safe supply spaces” being built in front of schools and daycare centres, De Shalit clarifies: “That's a misunderstanding people commonly have. Safe supply is not a consumption site.
“Consumption sites are of course themselves misunderstood. But to clarify, safe supply refers to a regulated, non-toxic supply administered by a qualified prescriber. It’s not a specific location.”
This two-year research project is comprised of four phases:
- situational mapping and analysis;
- interviews with key informants;
- qualitative analysis of interview data; and
- knowledge mobilization and dissemination.
Part of the study is a textual analysis looking at government reports and Canadian political and media sources to see how the language is being propelled, or the discourse.
In the winter, De Shalit will start recruiting interview participants.
“We are interested in speaking with frontline workers who either themselves administer safe supply or who have some role in the harm reduction community, to understand how the rhetoric is impacting their work and their clients,” she says.
Everything De Shalit has done since graduating is about taking a critical look at the power dynamics of policy: how policy shapes problems and the effects of such problematizations.
De Shalit started her research career over 15 years ago in the field of anti-human trafficking policy. More than 10 years ago, she became involved in research and advocacy around prison-based harm reduction, and her current work builds on that background.
De Shalit received her PhD in policy studies from Toronto Metropolitan University in 2021.