Dr. Justin Tetrault

Justin EC Tetrault, PhD
University of Alberta Augustana

Email: jtetraul@ualberta.ca
Twitter: @ECtetrault
Research Gate

Justin is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Alberta, Augustana Campus. He specializes in qualitative methodology, prisons, race and Indigeneity, extremism, and political sociology, and is currently working on two research projects.

The first is a semi-ethnographic study of the contemporary right-wing nationalist movement in Canada. This project is a methodological critique of dominant criminological and “countering-violent extremism” (CVE) research on the Canadian far-right. Contrasting these approaches, Justin develops a critical social movement studies framework for studying this phenomenon, examining Canada's right-wing nationalist movement through participant-observation at rallies and interviews with current organizers and supporters of nationalist groups. Interviews focus on activists' personal beliefs and their experiences organizing politically. Other themes include how activists manage online pages and how right-wing nationalist groups negotiate unwanted labels by media and leftist groups. He recently published two articles from this project, one in Current Sociology, titled “What’s hate got to do with it?: right-wing movements and the hate stereotype” and the second in The British Journal of Criminology, titled “Thinking beyond extremism: a critique of counterterrorism research on right-wing nationalist and far-right social movements”.

Second, Justin is a senior researcher and project manager of the University of Alberta Prison Project, a multi-year study of life experiences inside prisons in Western Canada. He wrote an article with Drs. Sandra Bucerius and Kevin Haggerty titled “Multiculturalism Under Confinement: Prisoner Race Relations Inside Western Canadian Prisons”, published in Sociology. The piece examines race politics in Canadian prisons and how prisoners internalize Canada’s national mythology, particularly multiculturalism. Justin is currently working on a piece for Crime and Justice: A Review of Research on Indigenized programming inside Canadian prisons (University of Chicago Press).

His other research interests include visual sociology, social theory, and surveillance studies. Justin is a proud member of the Manitoba Métis Nation.

Publications

Tetrault, J.E.C. (2021) Thinking Beyond Extremism: A Critique of Counterterrorism Research on Right-wing Nationalist and Far-right Social Movements. The British Journal of Criminology. [online first].

Tetrault, J. E. C., Bucerius, S. M., Haggerty, K. D. (2020). Multiculturalism Under Confinement: Prisoner Race Relations Inside Western Canadian Prisons, Sociology, 1-22.

Ricciardelli, R., Bucerius, S.M., Tetrault, J.E.C., Crewe, B., and Pyrooz, D. (2021). Correctional Services During and Beyond COVID-19. Policy Brief, Royal Society of Canada.

Tetrault, J. E. C. (2019). What’s Hate Got to Do with It?: Right-Wing Movements and the Hate Stereotype, Current Sociology, 1-21.

Haggerty, K. D. & J. E. C. Tetrault (2017). Surveillance. In B. Turner, C. Kyung-Sup, C. F. Epstein, P. Kivisto, W. Outhwaite, and M.J. Ryan (eds.). The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory. John Wily & Sons Ltd.

Book Reviews

Tetrault, J. E. C. (2020). [Review of the book From Righteousness to the Far-right: An Anthropological Rethinking of Critical Security Studies, by Emma McCluskey]. Security Journal.

Tetrault, J. E. C. (2017). [Review of the book Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in the Age of High Technology, by Gary T. Marx]. Policing and Society, 27(2), 245-247.

Tetrault, J. E. C. (2016). [Review of the book Face Politics, by Jenny Edkins]. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 41(3), 457-460.