Leigh Spanner
Faculty of Arts
Political Science
Assistant Professor
Office: MN 403
Phone: 902-4205268
Email: Leigh.Spanner@smu.ca
Leigh Spanner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Saint Mary’s University. Prior to joining SMU, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Social Innovation and Community Engagement in Military Affairs (SICEMA) at Mount Saint Vincent University. Dr. Spanner holds a PhD in political science from the University of Alberta.
Dr. Spanner’s research provides feminist-informed perspectives on policies of national security, military, and veteran life in Canada. She is particularly interested in the intersections between gender, global security, and intimate and everyday life, and the state’s political interest in shaping the latter. Dr. Spanner’s research is published in International Journal, Critical Military Studies, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender Culture & Social Justice, and in an edited volume titled Women, Peace and Security: Feminist Perspectives on International Security Studies (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021).
She engages with government and non-governmental organizations to integrate gender and intersectional perspectives into Canadian defence and security policy and practice. She has held contracts with Veterans Affairs Canada to provide policy recommendations on these issues.
Dr. Spanner is also a member of several research networks, such as the DND MINDS Collaborative Network on Transforming Military Cultures and formerly the Defence Security Foresight Group (Waterloo University).
Her teaching is that the nexus of gender and politics, international relations, and Canadian politics.
Dr. Spanner is completing a monograph titled ‘The Strength Behind the Uniform’: Operationalizing Gender in the Canadian Military Family. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and investigates the extent to which gendered relations of power and divisions of labour in military families are integral to the Canadian Armed Forces' (CAF) organizational and operational capacity. This is the first feminist-informed analysis of military family policy and programming in Canada and responds to recent and increasing interest in mainstreaming gender in the Department of National Defence (DND) and the Canadian Armed Forces. This work shows how social, economic, and political relations and hierarchies, such as gender, and the intimate lives of families and dynamics within households are structured and reinforced through public policy and uphold structures essential to global politics, including peace and security.
A second stream of Dr. Spanner’s research responds to the increasingly diverse new generation of Canadian veterans. This work explores the gendered and intersectional dynamics of transitioning from military to civilian life, with a particular focus on the injured and ill military members. It considers the relationships between gender, injury and illness, and caregiving and support (from both public and private spheres), in an increasingly neoliberal climate.
Dr. Spanner’s research provides feminist-informed perspectives on policies of national security, military, and veteran life in Canada, and in so doing brings a feminist political economy perspective to security studies. Her work addresses questions of social, political, and economic justice in these spaces, including support for military families, diversity in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC), and Canada’s adoption of Gender-Based Analysis-Plus (GBA+)
She is particularly interested in uncovering how war and global security schemes are reproduced and sustained through the mundane practices of everyday life, which are often taken for granted and deemed to be apolitical. Her work locates the household as an important site where labour occurs in support of global economies and, consequently, of interest to states and policy makers.
PhD, Political Science, University of Alberta (2019)
MA, Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland (2013)
BA (Hons), Political Science (Major) and Public Administration (Minor), University of Ottawa (2008)