Matt James

Matt James is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, where he studies the politics of reparation and transitional justice, focusing also on Canadian politics, constitutionalism, and social movement studies. He is the author of Misrecognized Materialists: Social Movements in Canadian Constitutional Politics (University of British Columbia Press) and has published on reparation, memory, and political apology in journals such as the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Citizenship Studies, Human Rights Review, and International Journal of Transitional Justice. He also produced for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada a major research report on truth commissions, victims, and perpetrators around the world.

 As a Fellow at CFGS, he is working on a project affiliated with the SSHRC-supported Past Wrongs, Future Choices team. This project examines the “mnemonics of rights,” the shorthand encapsulations of injustice and harm that actors use to make or contest rights claims, focusing in particular on invocations of Japanese-ancestry internments in relation to the so-called War on Terror in Canada, the US, and Australia.