Dr. Sandra Bucerius

Dr. Sandra Bucerius, Director
University of Alberta

Email: bucerius@ualberta.ca
Twitter: @SBucerius
UAlberta Profile

As an urban ethnographer and qualitative researcher, Dr. Bucerius is interested in issues pertaining to prisons; victim/offender overlap; immigration and crime; radicalization; and the opioid crisis. Dr. Bucerius holds numerous research grants, including a SSHRC Partnership grant. Her contributions have been recognized through a number of major awards, including the 2016 UofA Martha Cook Piper Research Prize, given to two faculty members annually 3 from across the University who are in the early stages of their careers, enjoy a reputation for original research, and show outstanding promise. She has also won a Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Teaching Award (across all ranks) as well as the Faculty of Arts Research Award (Assistant Professor). Her ethnography on drug dealers won 2nd place in the Deutscher Studienpreis Koerberstiftung competition in 2009 - the highest national award for social sciences dissertations in Germany. An article based on this research "What else should I do?" published in the Journal of Drug Issues in 2007, was awarded the Honorary Mention of the Migration Section of the American Sociological Association.

She is the co-editor of the Oxford University Press Handbook series in Criminology (alongside Michael Tonry). She is the Director of the University of Alberta prison project (UAPP), the largest mixed methods study on Canadian prisons in the history of Canadian criminology and examines how fentanyl and carfentanyl have changed the prison experience for prisoners and guards; whether prisons are spaces in which radicalization occurs and spreads; prison gangs; and the victimoffender overlap. In a second project, she is looking at how police officers perceive the risk of synthetic opioids. Dr. Bucerius has held several research agreements with Correctional Service Canada, Public Safety, Justice Alberta, and the Edmonton and Calgary Police Service, including, with the new-formed EPS community accelerator unit. Her five-year ethnography with drug dealers Unwanted - Muslim Immigrants, Dignity and Drug Dealing appeared with Oxford University Press in 2014 and received glowing reviews in many leading academic journals. She is also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on Ethnicity, Crime and Immigration and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Ethnographies of Crime and Criminal Justice. Her numerous journal articles appear in the British Journal of Criminology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, among others. Dr. Bucerius serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Criminology – the flagship journal of the discipline – and as executive member of the Canadian Research Network on Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS). She is also TSAS’s Publication Editor