Featured Instructors
Colette Brin takes wide-angle view of journalism and studies the transformations of journalistic practices. She is interested in the diversity of content and the convergence of newsrooms, the organization of work and the means implemented to facilitate organizational change. A Laval University faculty member since 2001, Brin is now a full professor and director of the Center for Media Studies. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Information and Communication, a Master's degree in Public Communication, and a PhD in Political Science. She worked for many years as a journalist in St. Boniface, in the written press for La Liberté, television at Radio-Canada and spent 5 years on Radio-Canada. Colette Brin's research and teaching interests are in information-gathering practices, methodology and theories of communication. Former President of the Canadian Communication Association (2012 - 2014), she is a regular media participant and engages with practice communities of journalism, communication, and political decision-makers.
Jean-Christophe Boucher is an Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy and at the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary. His current work focuses on applied machine learning to understand how the digital world shapes our society. He currently holds grants from the Department of National Defence (DND) to study information operations; the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to understand civil-military relations in Canada; and holds grants from Alberta Innovates, the Vaccine Confidence Fund and Merck to study vaccine hesitancy on social media to develop better communications strategies and tools to increase vaccine uptake. He holds a BA in History from the University of Ottawa, a MA in Philosophy from the Université de Montréal and a PhD in Political Science from Université Laval. He specializes in international relations, with an emphasis on foreign policy, international security, and data analytics.
Emily Laidlaw is a Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity Law and Associate Professor. She researches in the areas of technology regulation, cybersecurity, and human rights, with a focus on platform regulation, online harms, privacy, freedom of expression and corporate social responsibility. She is author of the book Regulating Speech in Cyberspace: Gatekeepers, Human Rights and Corporate Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Prior to joining the University of Calgary in 2014, Dr. Laidlaw spent almost ten years in the United Kingdom where she completed her LLM and PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science and held a tenure-track lectureship with the University of East Anglia Law School. As a scholar she actively contributes to law reform and other advisory work, with recent projects for the Federal Government, Law Commission of Ontario, the Uniform Law Conference of Canada, the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Council of Canadian Academies. Emily is a member of the Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance.
Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot is a Professor of Sociology and Vice Dean at the University of Calgary. Her primary research interests are in the realms of crime, risk, security, and social control, with specific interests in how individuals, organizations, agencies, and states orient to threats and how responses diverge and converge. She is co-author of two books with Leslie Kennedy, Risk Balance and Security (Sage, 2008) and Risk in Crime (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). One of her more recent projects focuses on high-risk offending from a life-course perspective and the management of these individuals from a public safety and policy perspective. Her new book, Pathways to Ruin? High-Risk Offending Over the Life Course (with Tamara Humphrey) was published in 2022 (University of Toronto Press). Her current projects focus on information and security, crime risk management, policing, victimization, and disorder.