I am a human geographer and interdisciplinary scholar focused on urban politics, planning, and policing in Canada. I approach this work with an interest in social and racial justice, and often draw on relevant work in Black studies and Black geographies to document how ideas about "race" shape urban policies and practices, and how social and racial justice movements imagine and seek to create different urban worlds.
Most of my work can be grouped into two broad categories:
– Urban planning and anti-blackness. Inspired by the long history of Black struggle against urban planning in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I have traced how anti-blackness (or simply anti-Black racism) has shaped urban planning ideas and practices in Halifax from the late 19th century to the present. This work is best represented in my book Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Recently, I have extended this work to Montreal, examining how new urban planning ideas and new tenants' rights in the 1980s were ultimately used to evict Black tenants in an emerging war on drugs and gangs.
– Urban security and policing. In a variety of studies, I have sought to document the prevalence of racial profiling and violence in policing and security practices, as well as the repression of movements to transform the police. This work, largely focused on Montreal, is best represented in my co-authored book, Out to Defend Ourselves: A History of Montreal's First Haitian Street Gang (Fernwood Press, 2023). This work also includes a participatory-action research project with racialized youth in the neighbourhood of Saint-Michel, various reports and media articles on policing and crime, a history of efforts to combat racial profiling and violence, and an ongoing project examining how Montreal's war on street gangs since the late 1980s has transformed policing and urban security.
I am interested in supervising masters and PhD research on municipal politics, policing, and planning, particularly in the city of Montreal.
GEOG 315 - Social and cultural geographies
URBS 398 - Housing policy
URBS 498 - Urban security and policing
HENV 690 - Seminar in social and cultural geographies
Books
Aurélien, M, and Rutland, T. 2023. Out to Defend Ourselves: A History of Montreal's First Haitian Street Gang. Halifax, Fernwood Press.
Aurélien, M, and Rutland, T. 2023. Il fallait se défendre: l'histoire du premier gang de rue haïtien à Montréal. Montreal, Mémoire d'encrier.
Articles
Book chapters
Reports
Print media
For a full and up-to-date list of my op-eds, magazine articles, and recorded lectures and interviews, see
www.tedrutland.com