About Shiri

Shiri Pasternak is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto. She holds a PhD in Planning and Geography from the University of Toronto. She is the author of the award-winning book Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and co-edited the collection Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition In Canada (Between the Lines, 2023). She is the co-founder and former Research Director for the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led think tank based in the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Shiri is a settler Canadian / Torontonian who has been an organizer in movements for affordable housing, Indigenous rights, and police abolition. She was a founding member of Abandonment Issues (for a use-it-or-lose-it housing bylaw), Barriere Lake Solidarity, the Indigenous Sovereignty and Solidarity Network, the Anti-Colonial Committee of the Law Union of Ontario, and the Toronto Abolition Convergence network, as well as an ally in the Defenders of the Land network. She is currently on the Steering Committee of the Jewish Faculty Network and an executive member of her union, the Toronto Metropolitan University Faculty Association (TFA).

Her work has been published in numerous books and academic journals. In addition to scholarly research, her public writing appears in places like the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star, as well as independent news platforms like the National Observer. She provides research support and policy analysis to several communities and organizations across the country.

Her current research involves a partnership with collaborators across North America to pilot projects on Indigenous jurisdiction over infrastructure, beyond extractivism. Her other recent research focuses on injunctions, criminalization of dissent, RCMP, land and specific claims policies, colonial fiscal policy and the political economy of colonization.

Get in touch.

shiri.pasternak@torontomu.ca