David Moffette

Associate Professor, Criminology

David Moffette is a sociologist who studies various questions related to the intersections between criminal law and immigration law, the securitization of immigration, borders and bordering practices, policing, state multiculturalism, and race and racism. His recent book Governing Irregular Migration: Bordering Culture, Labour and Security in Spain (UBC Press, 2018) looks at the logics and practices that have informed immigration and border policies in this southern European country since the 1980s.

He is the principal investigator for a new community-engaged research titled "Marginalized Communities in Ottawa: Encounters with the Police." The research team, composed of Chris Bruckert, Sadia Jama, David Moffette and Lindsay Snow, is documenting the experiences of encounters with the police in various disproportionately policed communities in Ottawa. The research is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.

His other research, titled "Municipal Immigration Control? Overlapping Jurisdictions, National Projects and Borderwork in Montreal and Barcelona," studies how institutional actors whose work is not primary concerned with immigration regulation can use municipal bylaws to govern immigration, and thus intervene in the city but on a space imagined as national. 

Research and supervision areas

• Socio-legal studies, sociology and anthropology of law

• Political sociology and governmentality studies

• Critical border, security and policing studies

• Canadian and European immigration policies

• Intersections between immigration law and criminal law

• Race, racialization and racism

• Spatiality, temporality, scales, jurisdictions