Please RSVP below for event, or event+lunch.
Speaker bio
Dr. Sule Tomkinson is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Université Laval. She is currently visiting Peter A. Allard School of Law and the UBC Centre for Migration Studies. Her expertise is in administrative justice, qualitative methodology, and research ethics. Her research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, The Fonds de recherche du Québec, The Canadian Foundation for Legal Research, The Quebec Bar Foundation, and The Department of Justice. She is currently writing her first book, called “The Quest for Administrative Justice in Canada” where she empirically examines the values considered at the heart of tribunal sector, specifically who defines and implements them and how.
Event Description:
Freedom of Information (FOI) or Access to Information (ATI) legislation regulates the right to make written requests for government records and aims to advance government transparency. Previous research either questions the effectiveness of FOI/ATI legislation or situates the requests as a means for obtaining information on government operations. This article develops FOI/ATI requests as a transformative qualitative methodology. Using insights of transformative framework and John Gaventa’s scholarship on power, it builds on a power analysis based on practice to contribute to a liberatory perspective of public administration. This focus enables researchers to analyze the multiple forms, levels, and spaces of power, as well as their interactions within public organizations, including immigration bureaucracies. To provide support for this argument, the author draws upon her experience with Canada’s ATI regime and requests from the Immigration and Refugee Board. The article first documents how ATI requests reveal policy tensions within the Board, providing a behind-the-scenes perspective to otherwise unavailable information. This follows by a consideration of successful complaints to the ATI watchdog regarding timely disclosure of Board records. The article suggests adopting this methodology offers transformative potential for public administration research and education and concludes with recommendations for its successful use.
You must RSVP by February 27 to be included in refreshments.
