Leah Levac

About

My research program focuses on the intersections between critical community engaged scholarship and public policy. I am interested in: 1) exploring how community engaged scholarship (CES) can become more critical and attentive to the knowledges and practices of often-invisible communities; 2) fostering innovations in public policymaking through critical CES; and 3) facilitating critical CES capacity-building.

I am involved with a number of collaborative projects that use intersectionality, deliberative democracy, anticolonialism and other theoretical ideas to consider how public policy making processes and outcomes can be more attentive to the experiences and knowledges of invisible and hyper-visible communities, and welcome students working in these areas.

Photo credit: Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation / Joana Bezeau | Photographe et vidéaste | Québec / Canada.

Select Publications

• Levac, L., McMurtry, L., Stienstra, D., Baikie, G., Hanson, C., & Mucina, D. (2018). Learning across Indigenous and western knowledge systems and intersectionality: Reconciling social science research approaches. SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis report. Available online at: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women
• Levac, L., & Worts, S. (2018). Invisible young women and public policy in Ontario. Canadian Public Policy, 44(1), 41-53.
• Manning, S., & Levac, L. (2022). Exaggerated tensions, fierce resistance, little understanding: The incorporation of gender-based analysis plus in Impact Assessment legislation. Canadian Public Administration, 65(2), 1-19.
• Levac, L., Cattapan, A., LeBlanc Haley, T., Pin, L., Tungohan, E., & Wiee, S.M. (2022). Transforming public policy with engaged scholarship: Better together. Policy & Politics, 50(3), 302-322.
• Levac, L., Stinson, J., Manning, S., & Stienstra, D. (2021). Expnding evidence and expertise in impact assessment: Informing Canadian public policy with the knowledges of invisible communities. Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, 39(3), 218-228.
• Levac, L., & Wiebe, S.M. (Eds.). (2020). Creating Spaces of Engagement: The Practical Craft of Deliberative Democracy. University of Toronto Press.
• Deska-Gauthier, S., Levac, L., & Hanson, C. (2022). The political framing of actors in the Independent Assessment Process: Justice oversights. Journal of Canadian Studies, 56(1), 35-68.
• Manning, S., & Levac, L. (2022). The Canadian Impact Assessment Act and intersectional analysis: Exaggerated tensions, fierce resistance, little understanding. Canadian Public Administration. https://doi.org/10.1111/capa.12458

Awards and Achievements

Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science Early Researcher Award, 2017-2022.

Education

University of New Brunswick, PhD Interdisciplinary Studies; Queen’s University, B.Ed