Dr. Dany Lacombe, Professor of Sociology, is the author of Talking Reform: Making and Unmaking a Life in Canada’s Prisons (McGill-Queens University Press, 2025). Part memoir and part ethnography, the book is the result of a six-year collaboration with Mac, an ex-con, a lifer struggling to remain clean on the outside as he battles shame and trauma from a violent past. Combining storytelling, classroom performances, and examination of Mac’s prison record, the book investigates how the prison culture, mental health professionals, and trauma narratives affected Mac’s journey from addiction, incarceration, and the criminal world to becoming a guest speaker in Lacombe’s class. (See ).

Lacombe continues to work on Sex Offender School, an ethnography of a treatment program for incarcerated sex offenders, a project which explores the techniques of introspection and self-management and the changes of habits a rehabilitated sex offender must deploy at the turn of the 21^st century.

PhD, University of Toronto
MA, University of Toronto
BA, Université de Sherbrooke

Books

• (2025)
• Law as a Gendering Practice
  Edited with Dorothy Chunn (2000)
• Blue Politics: Pornography and the Law in the Age of Feminism (1994)
• Ideology and Public Policy: the Case Against Pornography (1988)