Positionality Statement

Dr. Gail Anderson, Simon Fraser University

My name is Gail Scott Anderson, and my background is Celtic. I was conceived in India, where my father worked at the time, and born in the north of England to a Scottish father and North Yorkshire mother of Scottish origins. Much of my early life was spent in the former Yugoslavia, where, again, my father worked. I grew up in Yorkshire, which is originally Celtic territory but was colonised and conquered many times by a variety of invaders over the millennia. My father was overseas most of my childhood, but I had a privileged, stable, and happy home. I was the first in my family to go to university.

I came to Canada to attend graduate school at Simon Fraser University, where I work today on the unceded traditional, ancestral, and occupied lands of the Coast Salish Peoples including the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) Nations. I am grateful to live on the unceded traditional, ancestral, and occupied lands of the Kwantlen, Sto:lo and WSÁNEĆ Nations.

I am a biologist, specifically an entomologist, and always wanted to do something useful with my science. So, I became a forensic entomologist, working on homicide, animal cruelty and poaching cases. When I moved to the School of Criminology from the Department of Biological Sciences, I was interested to see how infrequently biology was considered in criminology, despite all the new and exciting research being conducted on the biology of criminal behaviour. I developed a course and later a book (now in its 2nd edition) on biological influences on criminal behaviour to introduce my students to the basic biological underpinnings of behaviour so they could understand the relatively new field of biosocial criminology. I feel that this is a hopeful area of criminology as many biological risk factors can be better managed once we understand them. Also, studying biological factors such as epigenetic effects help us comprehend why the abuses of residential schools and other forms of systemic discrimination not only impact the generation abused but also produce biological effects on future generations.

I fully recognise the white privileges and benefits of the circumstances of my birth and upbringing and the impossibility of seeing the world from others’ perspectives. We all have very different experiences and ways of understanding, and scientific thought, as a way of understanding the natural world, is one of those. Biological approaches are one of many different ways of attempting to understand criminogenic behaviour, and there are many others, such as Indigenous approaches, which, although not covered in this chapter, are no less valid.