Jen Rinaldi
PhD
Associate Professor
Legal Studies
Faculty of Social Science and Humanities
Contact information
Bordessa Hall
- Room 514
Downtown Oshawa
55 Bond Street East
Oshawa, ON
905.721.8668 ext. 5873
Research topics
- Disability and law
- Feminist and queercrip legal theory
- Health law and policy
- Mental health law
- Reproductive technologies
- Prison and police abolition
- Deinstitutionalization
Background
Dr. Jen Rinaldi is a socio-legal scholar who uses critical arts-based and participatory action research methods to study the conditions for, defining features of, and solutions to, institutional and carceral violence. She earned a Doctoral degree in Critical Disability Studies at York University, where she studied regulation of reproductive technologies. She earned a Master’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Guelph, where she studied constitutional protection of LGBTQ+ rights. Her early-career research included contributions to fat studies scholarship and analysis of disordered eating recovery, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality.
With her research collective she has spent over ten years mobilizing scholars, students, artists, and intellectually disabled institutional survivors to document survivor-centric histories of institutionalization. She is committed to working with/in impacted communities and social service industries to challenge conditions of violence and reimagine communities and care relations built on abolitionist principles. Her books published in collaboration with Dr. Kate Rossiter include Institutional Violence and Disability: Punishing Conditions (Routledge), and the award-winning edited collection Population Control: Theorizing Institutional Violence (McGill-Queen’s University Press). She serves as a regional advocate for the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies Ontario team.
Education
- PhD, Critical Disability Studies York University
- MA, Philosophy University of Guelph
Courses taught
Courses Dr. Rinaldi routinely teaches include:
- LGLS 2200U Legal Theory
- LGLS 3220U Philosophy of Law
- LGLS 3300U Disability and the Law
- LGLS 3330U Gender, Sexuality and the Law
- LGLS 3700U Law and Power
- LGLS 4020U Topics in Comparative Law
- LGLS 4030U Law and the Body
- MSPI 5020G Interdisciplinary Theory and Practice II: Community-Engaged Research
Research and expertise
Dr. Rinaldi is an expert in the following research areas:
- Disability justice, activism, and advocacy
- Queer, crip, and feminist theory
- Queer and trans rights
- Reproductive rights and justice
- Institutional, carceral, state, and structural violence
- Constitutional law
- Health law
- Due process rights
- Prison and police abolition
She can supervise graduate research projects in all of the above areas of research.
Social Science & Humanities Research Council Imagining Canada’s Future Ideas Lab: Global Health and Wellness for the 21st Century Grant – Mar 2024 – 3 years.
Do No Harm: Toward the Abolition of Carceral Forms of Perinatal Clinical Care. $250,000.
Rinaldi, J. (PI), I. Abdillahi, J. Smith, A. Wright, & Y. Zoldan.
Social Science & Humanities Research Council Partnership Engage Grant – Feb 2024 – 3 years.
When Words Wound: Navigating Moral Distress Associated with Documented Institutional Abuse. $25,000.
Rossiter, K. (Co-PI), J. Rinaldi (Co-PI), & S. Saravanamuttu.
Social Science & Humanities Research Council Connection Grant – Apr 2022 – 1 year.
Advocates Assemble: Disability Research from the Ground Up, $15,000.
Rinaldi, J. (PI), T. Bryant, P. Côté, & S. Walsh.
Social Science & Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant – Mar 2019 – 2 years.
Transgressing Body Boundaries: Multi-Media Storytelling on Trans Approaches to Weight Stigma, $30,000.
Rinaldi, J. (Co-PI), J. Pyne (Co-PI), M. Friedman, K. Pendleton Jimenez, & D. McPhail.
Strategic Program Investment Fund – Jan 2018 – 5 years.
Huronia Survivors Speakers Bureau, $30,000.
Rinaldi, J. (PI), K. Rossiter, & n.v. davis halifax.
Women’s College Hospital Women’s Xchange 15K Challenge – Jan 2015 – 2 years.
Through Thick & Thin: Investigating Body Image & Body Management among Queer Women in Southern Ontario, $75,000.
Rinaldi, J. (Co-PI), L. Gillis (Co-PI), C. Rice, K. Pendleton Jimenez, M. Friedman, & D. McPhail.
Social Science & Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant – Jan 2014 – 3 years.
Recounting Huronia: A Participatory Arts-Based Research Project, $75,000.
Rossiter, K. (PI), n.v. davis halifax, D. Fancy, J. Dolmage, J. Rinaldi, P. Seth, & M. Slark.
Involvement
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Selected publications
Rinaldi, J., & K. Rossiter (in press). A Levinasian Analysis of Disability Service Providers’ Work Witnessing Documented Institutional Abuse. Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability.
Veitch, A., & J. Rinaldi (2026). The Cruelty of the Curative: A Disability-Based Critique of Recovery Narratives. Atlantis, 47(1), 131-144.
Abdillahi, I., J. Rinaldi, J. Smith, L. Munro, E. Hudon, J. Lamers, A. Murage, A. Wright, & Y. Zoldan (2026). You Don’t Need Criminal Law to Make Cops: Reading Carceral Care Work into Reproductive Healthcare Policies in Vancouver. Social Science & Medicine, 399(119235), 1-10.
Rinaldi, J. (2025). Medical-Legal Alliances: Encounters with Excited Delirium in Ontario Coronial Law. Studies in Social Justice, 19(1), 22-42.
Rinaldi, J., & S. Fernando (2024). The Flows of Racial Capitalism: Charting the Spread of COVID-19 through Alberta’s Meatpacking Industry. Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 10(2), 1-20.
Rinaldi, J., & K. Rossiter (Eds.) (2023). Population Control: Theorizing Institutional Violence. Kingston: McGill-Queen University Press.
Rinaldi, J. (2021). What Survivors See: Creative Condemnations of Total Institutionalization. Emotion, Space & Society, 40, 1-8.
Rinaldi, J., & K. Rossiter (2021). Huronia’s Double Bind: How Institutionalization Bears Out on the Body. Somatechnics, 11(1), 92-111.
Rinaldi, J., & O. Marques (2021). “Here I Sit in this Dismal Crypt”: Insider Interpretations of the Canadian Carceral Necropolis. International Journal for Crime, Justice & Social Democracy, 9(4), 1-16.
Rice, C., K. Pendleton Jimenez, E. Harrison, M. Robinson, A. LaMarre, J. Rinaldi, & J. Andrew (2020). Bodies at the Intersection: Reconfiguring Intersectionality through Queer Women’s Creative Accounts of their Complex Embodiments. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, 46(1), 177-200.
Rossiter, K., & J. Rinaldi (2019). Institutional Violence & Disability: Punishing Conditions. London: Routledge.
Rinaldi, J., & S. Fernando (2019). Queer Credibility in the Homonation-State: Interrogating the Affective Impacts of Credibility Assessments on Racialized Sexual Minority Refugee Claimants. Refuge, 35(1), 32-42.
Rice, C., E. Chandler, J. Rinaldi, K. Liddiard, N. Changfoot, R. Mykitiuk, & I. Mundel (2017). Imagining Disability Futurities. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 32(2), 213-229.
Rice, C., E. Chandler, J. Rinaldi, K. Liddiard, & E. Harrison (2016). Pedagogical Possibilities for Unruly Bodies. Gender & Education, 28(8), 1-20.
- Creative projects
2025 Federation of Humanities & Social Sciences Canada Prize in recognition of the country’s five most inspiring, impactful, and transformative scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences.
2023 University of Ontario Institute of Technology Faculty Association Service Award.
2019 Ontario Tech University Teaching & Learning Centre Early Career Teaching Award.
2016 Community Living Ontario James Montgomerie Community Award in recognition of leadership and innovation in furthering Community Living goals.