The Centre for Law, Technology and Society is delighted to announce that PhD candidateSuzie Dunnhas been appointed as Assistant Professor at the Dalhousie University Schulich School of Law as of July 1, 2021. Professor Dunn will also then become an Associate member of the Centre.
A proud member of the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology and Society, Suzie Dunn is currently completing her PhD in Law. She was awarded the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship for her doctoral research on digital misrepresentations and deepfakes as a form of gender-based violence.
Suzie Dunn is a dynamic member of the law and technology community deeply committed to equality issues. She is currently a Senior Fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation where she is working on a aimed at combating online gender-based violence internationally. She is also a member of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund’s which advocates for legal reforms related to this form of violence. She is a co-lead of , a project that aims to highlight technology issues that are relevant to members of equality-seeking groups, such as Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, members of the LGBTQ2S+ community, and people with disabilities; and people at the intersection. As a research assistant for Professor , she has been working with to develop a on technology-facilitated violence. In an SSHRC funded partnership with the University of Ottawa and Osgoode Hall, she was one of the co-organizers of the “Tackling Technology Facilitated Violence” conference.
In 2018, she worked as a policy advisory for the Digital Inclusion Lab at Global Affairs Canada in drafting two international commitments to end gender-based violence in digital contexts, including the G7’s, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee’s resolution titled “”, both of which were adopted that year.
In 2019, Suzie Dunn was part of the legal team that supported CIPPIC’s in . This case involved a high-school teacher who had used a secret camera pen to take images of his female students for a sexual purpose. In its 2019 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada clarified the term “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the criminal voyeurism provision. This was a key case in the jurisprudence related to privacy and image-based abuse.
In 2020-2021, she worked with the British Columbia Society of Transition Houses’ to develop a toolkit on how to collect digital evidence for victims of technology-facilitated violence.
Until her appointment, Suzie Dunn was a part-time professor within the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, teaching first-year contract’s law course as well as a seminar course she developed on the Law of Images. She also served as a Digital Orientation Strategist where she prepared the incoming class for a new online learning format and presented mandatory bystander intervention workshops to first-year law students to help inform students on how to prevent sexual violence.
Suzie Dunn holds a J.D. and LL.M. from the University of Ottawa and was called to the Ontario bar in 2016.
Suzie Dunn will start her career at Dalhousie University on July 1, 2021, on which date she will also become an Associate Member of the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology and Society, following a unanimous anticipated motion of the Management Committee.
Congratulations to Suzie Dunn!