Kamari Maxine Clarke, a Distinguished Professor of transnational justice and sociolegal studies, and director of the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, has received the 2025 Insight Award from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
The prize is one of several Impact Awards presented annually by SSHRC. It recognizes scholars whose work has made a significant contribution to knowledge and understanding about people, societies and the world.
For more than twenty years, Clarke has led research on legal institutions, human rights and international law, as well as religious nationalism and the politics of race and globalization. Her work explores fundamental questions around culture and power, detailing the complex connections between emerging social formations and today’s most pressing issues.
This year’s Insight Award recognizes Clarke for generating vital new empirical knowledge, theories, and key innovations in anthropology and law. She is being commended in particular for her work as principal investigator of a SSHRC Insight Grant entitled “Evidentiary Dilemmas and Emergent Publics: How Contestations over New Geospatial Technologies are Shaping International Justice.”
Focusing on Mexico and Nigeria, hers was the first ethnographic research initiative to engage in an empirical study of the uses of geospatial technology to track mass atrocity violence, and to leverage that evidence in the building of human rights cases.
Thanks to this project, citizen-activists are learning to use geospatial technologies in the search for missing individuals. The project has also contributed to the burgeoning field of memory studies and has expanded the ethnographic literature on the anthropology of geospatial technologies and human-technological interactions.
Her work has benefited numerous groups, including families of the missing and murdered, human rights advocates and organizations, and lawyers and law enforcement officers. It has also yielded recommendations for documentation, advocacy and accountability.
“I am honoured to be receiving the 2025 SSHRC Insight Award, as it recognizes not only my work and the work of my collaborators — professors Jennifer Burrell and Sara Kendall — but also the communities, histories and solidarities that have shaped it,” said Clarke. “In many ways the award affirms the importance of research that takes seriously the lived experiences of those whose voices are too often marginalized in policy and academic discourses. I’m pleased that this award is recognizing the impact that grass-roots research can have in intervening into cycles of violence.”
The Insight Award is just one of her recent honours. In 2024 she was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2021 received the Guggenheim Prize for career excellence.
“Kamari Maxine Clarke is globally renowned for her advancement of knowledge, theory, and innovation in the areas of anthropology and law,” says Stephen Wright, interim dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science. “Her extraordinary influence is celebrated not only within academia, but by those working in the fields of international law and human rights. Most notably, her work continues to make direct improvements in the lives of people affected by violence and trauma. It is my privilege to congratulate her on being named the winner of the 2025 SSHRC Insight Award.”