Dr. Ann De Shalit is a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor. She earned a Master of Social Work from York University and a PhD in Policy Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). She previously held two postdoctoral positions, one with the University of Windsor and another with Ontario Tech University. She has also held course director positions at Ontario Tech, York, and Trent Universities.
Her research primarily focuses on two areas: prison and community harm reduction and anti-trafficking policy, programming, and discourse. She has been researching in the area of prison harm reduction for over a decade and in the field of anti-trafficking for 15 years. Her research utilizes qualitative community-based methodologies and critical textual and discourse analysis. She is also regularly involved in grassroots campaigns on migrant and labour justice. She recently co-edited a collection entitled, Trafficking harms: Critical politics, perspectives and experiences (2014, Fernwood Publishing).
Among her current studies is an examination of how conceptualizations of labour exploitation, forced/unfree labour, labour precarity, labour trafficking, and related conditions are mobilized in Canadian academic and grey literature, for which she was funded by a SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant as Co-Investigator. She is also involved in two long-term SSHRC-funded studies. One is with colleagues at the University of Windsor, TMU, Queen’s University, and the University of Ottawa on the political advocacy of Ontario-based charitable organizations. The other is with TMU and the HIV Legal Network on harm reduction in federal prisons, which contributed to the roll out of the federal Prison Needle Exchange Program in 2018.
For her SSHRC-funded postdoctoral research, Dr. De Shalit is working with Dr. Adrian Guta of the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor on the political and media rhetoric framing Canada’s safe supply programming, a harm reduction measure that responds to the rising rates of overdose and death resulting from the unregulated toxic drug supply. The project explores the impacts of misinformed and misplaced rhetoric on program delivery and the safety of harm reduction users and workers.