Andrew Woolford

I am a professor of Sociology & Criminology and former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Much of my current research is centred in the field of genocide studies, with specific emphasis on cultural techniques of group destruction deployed against Indigenous Peoples in North America. This focus is best reflected in my 2015 book, “This Benevolent Experiment”: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide and Redress in North America (University of Nebraska Press and the University of Manitoba Press). However, I also maintain broad interests in the fields of Sociology, Socio-Legal Studies, and Criminology. Another research project has further expanded my scholarly boundaries and brought me into contact with new fields and themes: representation, empathy, affect, and human-computer interaction, to name but a few. This is a project built upon decolonizing/unsettling and community-led research principles through which my team will design, build and test a virtual Indian Residential School to analyze the educational and empathy-inducing potential of contemporary forms of virtual and augmented reality technology. I am also working with Survivors from the Assiniboia Residential School to advance public knowledge about and commemoration of their former school, which was located in the River Heights Neighbourhood of Winnipeg. I have most recently undertaken a project titled “Symbiotic Destruction: Genocide, Human Groups, and the Natural World”, which examines human and other-than-human relations in the context of genocide.