About me

Life: thus far
I have been cursed with the morality gene since about the age of five but beyond letter
writing and the signing of petitions it did not flower into research, teaching, writing and
activism until after I heard Noam Chomsky’s Massey Lectures on CBC Radio in the fall
of 1988. I took up the causes of East Timor, El Salvador, the Palestinians, women and the
indigenous peoples of Canada, protested and spoke out against the invasions of Iraq,
Afghanistan and much else, and continue to do what I can to the present day. My focus
has always been on the responsibility of the “complicit enablers,” including myself.
I was born in the summer of 1947, after the coldest English winter on record. My
parents, who had grown up in the poorer housing of inner Liverpool, were on the housing
list and, newly married, had moved into what was a new estate on the outskirts of the city
in the late 1930s. The estate – what we would call a subdivision – was built by local
government (the “council”), to which we paid rent for what was in effect social housing.
At 18 I left home to attend university in London. Fees, maintenance (lodging and
food) and books were all paid for by the state. I could not have gone to university
otherwise.
I obtained a BA honours degree in Geography (with subsidiary Economics) from
University College London in 1968. That same year I moved to Canada as a landed
immigrant with my then wife and baby son, taught in a Saskatchewan high school for a
year, then spent six years in graduate studies at the University of British Columbia,
obtaining a PhD in Sociology in 1975 and becoming a Canadian citizen. During those
years of study I also worked for a time with the British Columbia Civil Liberties
Association.
After a one-year position at the University of Toronto (Erindale College) I was
hired at Wilfrid Laurier University as a professor in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology where I spent the rest of my university career (1976-2016), apart from
visiting appointments at Universität Konstanz, Wolfson College Oxford, Northumbria
University, University of Wales at Bangor, St. Mary’s University, Universidad Autónoma
de Zacatecas and (briefly) the University of Macau, plus sabbatical years spent in Tours,
France and Mexico City.
From 1990 to 2015 I taught courses on the political economy of human rights
focused on US/Canadian state-organized crime on behalf of the empire at home and
overseas.
I am now a retired professor of sociology who specialized in ethnomethodology,
sociology of crime and the political economy of human rights.
I am the author, co-author or co-editor of 7 books (plus Italian translations and a
second edition of one of them), 19 book chapters (including one in French), 22 journal
articles (including a Japanese translation) and sundry articles in magazines and the press.
I was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship (in Konstanz) in 1980-81. My
book with Stephen Hester, The Montreal Massacre (WLU Press, 2003) was short-listed
for the Innis Prize for Best English-Language Book in the Social Sciences for 2004.
My second wife and I live happily in Kitchener, Ontario where she is a downtown
city councillor and I write and participate actively in local development issues while also
joining protests, writing letters and signing petitions!