Academics across Canada, an officially bilingual and multicultural country, devote a lot of attention to diversity and representation. This is particularly true for political scientists. In this research note, we focus on the linguistic composition of panels and overall linguistic fragmentation of the most important in-person event for Canadian political science: the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA). To do so, we generated a dataset based on the official program of the 2023 annual conference. Our main results are twofold. First, we find an important under-representation of French-speaking events and academic communications (i.e., panels and papers). Second, we computed Herfindahl-Hirschman indexes demonstrating that francophone-dominated panels and co-authored papers with francophone first authors are significantly more linguistically diverse than anglophone panels and papers. Our results highlight important blind spots in Canadian political science and help make sense of the lack of representation of French-language work in Canadian academia.

In Canada, there is renewed attention to the violence experienced by Indigenous peoples in residential schools, by police, through hyper-imprisonment and child removal, in hospitals, and in the contemporary education system. All of these issues are interlinked and outcomes of the carceral state—defined as the policing, monitoring, surveillance, criminalization and imprisonment of people, especially Indigenous and other racialized peoples. In this article, I define and illustrate what the carceral state looks like in Canada. I articulate the current approach to studying the carceral in political science, note the paucity of research in the Canadian context and show where attention has been cast previously. I describe an improved approach to studying the carceral, arguing that a decolonized approach to studying the carceral must be relational and abolitionist, seeking to reduce and eliminate the use of carceral interventions.