Information Science PhD Student Lauren Kilgour has been awarded a three-year Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to support her research studying the roles that regulations play in processes of technological innovation.
Within this wider area of inquiry, Kilgour’s research focuses on the design of electronic ankle monitors and how they are used in the United States’ criminal justice system.
Available since the 1980s, electronic ankle monitors are tracking devices worn by people accused or convicted of a criminal offence that send their location information to law enforcement agencies. Over the past decade, the number of people supervised using ankle monitors has sharply expanded 140 percent, from 53,000 people in 2005 to more than 125,000 in 2015. As the use of ankle monitors rapidly increases in the US, Kilgour’s work aims to critically consider the challenges and benefits of implementing digital alternatives to incarceration. Kilgour is a second-year PhD student who studies the culture and politics of network technology, and is supervised by Karen Levy.