Visiting scholars & Post-Docs

Eva Angelyna Bogdan (2019-2021) SSHRC & MEOPAR Postdoctoral fellow

Research Interests: Crises and Disasters, Governance, Community Engagement, Policy and Practices

Flooding is Canada’s most frequent and costly hazard. Eva’s postdoctoral research focuses on developing innovative approaches to engaging in difficult conversations on flood management in Canadian communities. She is examining how diverse and competing interests are navigated in decision-making related to flood risk governance. Eva’s postdoctoral project is funded by SSHRC & MEOPAR, and builds on her doctoral research on governance in the context of Alberta’s 2013 flooding disaster. Her research contributes to building capacity in disaster governance and innovation in stakeholder engagement to address complex policy problems.

Eva is working alongside Dr. Daniel Henstra, Dr. Jason Thistlethwaite, and the FLOODGOV team to conduct comparative case studies in Canadian cities on flood risk governance arrangements and evaluate their effectiveness in a changing climate.  

Eva has experience as both an academic researcher and practitioner in socio-environmental issues related to floods, fuels, food, and farming on four different continents. Her research is published in the following venues: Canadian Review of Sociology; Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development; International Journal of River Basin Management (tentatively scheduled for 2020); and several books.

Email: eva.bogdan@uwaterloo.ca

Ryan Deschamps (2019-2020) Postdoctoral Fellow

Research Interests: Public Policy, Agenda Setting, Computational and Mixed-Methods Research, Information Systems Analysis

Ryan Deschamps is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in public policy, information management and computational methods. He completed his PhD in 2017 at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, studying the influence of Twitter on Canadian Policy Agenda Setting. From 2017-2019 he worked with Dr. Ian Milligan at the University of Waterloo building tools and conducting analyses on Terrabytes worth of Canadian Web Archive data. He has publications in Canadian Public Administration, Policy & Internet and Canadian Journal of nonprofit and social economy research and his research on Cyberbullying is featured in the Parliament of Canada website as "further reading" for Bill C-13 ("Rehtaeh's Law"). In addition to his research work, he has an extensive list of open source contributions on github, usually building tools for conducting computational analysis of political networks and other sociometric methods.

Email: ryan.deschamps@gmail.com

Sarah Shoker (2019-2020) Postdoctoral fellow

Research Interests: Gender, emerging technologies and international security

I received my PhD in political science from McMaster University. My dissertation, which was nominated for the CAGS/UMI Distinguished Dissertation Award, examined the Bush and Obama-era decision to exclude boys and men from drone warfare’s collateral damage count. The nomination came from my novel contributions to the field; I was able to empirically demonstrate that data analysts used stereotypes about gender and religion to inform who was selected as a drone target. As a result, civilians were often mischaracterized as combatants. "Military-Age Males in U.S Counterinsurgency and Drone Warfare" is currently under contract with Palgrave MacMillan, with publication tentatively scheduled for 2020.

I am the founder of Glassbox, a consultancy firm that trains teams in software development, legal services, and government to identify how choices made along the AI technical pipeline can translate into social bias.

My research interests focus on international security, emerging technologies, and gender. I am currently working with Dr. Bessma Momani and Dr. Michael Mosca on projects relating to quantum computing's policy impact on Canadian critical infrastructure. 

Email: sshoker@uwaterloo.ca

Rachael Johnstone (2018-2020) Postdoctoral Fellow

Research Interests: Gender and Politics; Canadian Politics; Public Policy; Charter Politics; Law and Public Policy

Rachael’s research has appeared in the Journal of Canadian Studies, the International Journal of Canadian Studies, and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Society. Her book, After Morgentaler: The Politics of Abortion in Canada, was published with UBC Press in 2017.

Rachael is a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr. Bessma Momani on issues of gender and public policy. Her research explores intersections of politics, public policy, law, and healthcare as they relate to gendered bodies. To date, her research has focused predominately on the regulation of abortion politics in Canada in the context of the federal policy vacuum left in the wake of R. v. Morgentaler (1988), the Supreme Court case that decriminalized abortion in Canada. This work includes projects on Canadian public policy, Charter jurisprudence, and the role of federalism in shaping the regulation of women’s bodies and their relationship to the state.

Prior to joining the Balsillie School, Rachael was an Assistant Professor at the Bader International Study Centre (Queen’s University, Canada) in the United Kingdom.

Email: rjohnstone@balsillieschool.ca

Sabrina (Yanhong) Lei (2019-2020) Visiting Scholar from School of Public Affairs, Xiamen University, China

Research Interests: Public finance, Political Economy, Leadership, Institutionalism

The research theme focus is “Diplomatic Positioning of the States: A Comparison between China and Canada”. This topic can contribute important ideas and contents to the book “Consensus and Control: Analysis of Human Political Life”, which I am writing. In my initial understanding, “Consensus” and “Control”, as the description of National Mental State, can be applied to analyze the States’ diplomatic strategy. In “Consensus” situation, actors prefer dynamic balance, think highly of rules, tolerate differences, and are willing to maintain the flexibility of existing frameworks to cope with external changes. As far as “Control” is concerned, actors attach importance to direct controllability, emphasize propriety, dislike complexity, and try to find ways to improve certainty and ensure controllability. The topic mainly revolves around three issues: Firstly, from the perspective of political psychology, it analyses the essence of both Chinese traditional “tributary system” and the government of PRC continuously attaching great importance to other countries’ political statements or positions on major or sensitive issues. Secondly, with the analysis of Chinese national political psychology, it discusses what kinds of international rules are understandable and acceptable to China's political leaders, why some of these rules are difficult for them to understand and accept, and what type of rules that they are unwilling to admit and absorb. Thirdly, based on deeply understanding the history of Canada, the topic will explore the connotation of consensus diplomacy principle of the Canadian government in the international political and economic activities and the reasons for its formation.

Email: yhlei2002@163.com

Maxime Boucher (2017-2019) FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow

Research Interests: Lobbying, Public policy, Public administration, Democracy, Corporate political activities, Revolving door lobbying, Corporate citizenship rights.

Maxime’s research has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Political Science and L’Administration contemporaine de l’État.

His research, funded by the SSHRC and the FRQ, focuses on two complementary aspects of lobbying and corporate political activities. By making use of “big data” sources such as the lobbying registry, it shows how Canadian political institutions affect the relations between organized interests and policy-makers. He is also interested in the regulation of lobbying and other forms of corporate political activities in North America and Europe. His research on the topic shows how lobbying regulation affects the state of corporate political rights in contemporary democracies.

Email: maxime.boucher@uwaterloo.ca