Chris Hurl

1. Classical Social Theory

2. Sociology of Occupations

3. Social Inequalities

4. Economic Transformations in Capitalist Society

1. Political economy

2. Governance and regulation

3. Urban studies

4. Sociology of work

5. Social movements

6. Modes of Critique in Contemporary Sociology and Anthropology

My research looks at how knowledge is generated and put to work in social struggles.

How do people develop new ways of knowing through the process of struggle? How do they learn from each other?

And how have they confronted the consolidation of information systems that codify, commodify and constrain the circulation of knowledge in different ways?

In conducting this research, I am influenced by a range of theoretical approaches, including science and technology studies, Marxist political economy, and institutional ethnography. I also utilize different methods, including interviews, participant observation, and archival research.
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I’ve explored these themes through four different research projects:

Data activism
- I am interested in the sense-making practices of data activist groups around the world. In the context of increasing technological and organizational complexity, and with the proliferation of new institutional processes and procedures governing access to information, how do social activists generate the capacity to make sense of the institutions that they confront? What practices and strategies have they developed for gleaning information about government and corporations in the digital age? How do they share these strategies and promote learning and critical literacies amongst their members and citizens that they hope to recruit or collaborate with? Selected publications:
* Hurl, C.,  Rowen, E., Senneville, M.,Walby, K. Forthcoming. Mobilizing Data for Justice: Activist Strategies for the Digital Age. Toronto: Between the Lines.
* Hurl, C. 2022.Accounting from Below: Activists Confront Outsourcing in a London Borough. Critical Policy Studies, 16(3): 352-370.
* Hurl, C. and Klostermann, J. 2019. “Remembering George W. Smith’s ‘Life Work’: From Politico-Administrative Regimes to Living Otherwise,” Studies in Social Justice, 13(2): 262-282.

Public sector struggles and state formation
- I am interested in how public sector unionization in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the development of new research capacities on the part of workers that, when integrated with grassroots organizing, contributed to the transformation of the state and the collective bargaining process.

Selected publications:
* Hurl, C. 2022. A Militancy of Invidious Comparisons: The Contested Value of Hospital Work in Ontario, 1959-1974.” Labour / Le Travail, 89: 235-261
* Hurl, C. 2017. From Scavengers to Sanitation Workers: Practices of Purification and the Making of Civic Employees in Toronto, 1890-1920. Labour / Le Travail, 79(1): 81-104.
* Brownlee, J., Hurl, C. and Walby, K. (eds.) 2018. Corporatizing Canada: Making Business Out of Public Service. Toronto: Between the Lines.

Consultants and government
- I am interested in how big consulting firms have contributed to the consolidation of neoliberal regimes of governance over the past four decades. This has involved building networks and advocacy coalitions, but also assembling data infrastructures and management information systems that have profoundly reshaped the way that knowledge is generated about public services.

Selected publications:
    - Hurl, C. and Barrett Werner, L. 2024. The Consulting Trap: How Professional Service Firms Hook Governments and Undermine Democracy. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2024.
    * Hurl, C. and Nurmohamed, 2024. A. Building walls within walls: Making Value Defensible in Public Private Partnerships, Economy and Society.
    * Vogelpohl, A., Hurl, C., Howard, M., Marciano, R., Purandare, U., & Sturdy, A. 2022. Pandemic consulting. How private consultants leverage public crisis management. Critical Policy Studies, 16(3), 371-381.
    * Hurl C. and Vogelpohl, A. (eds). 2021. Professional Service Firms and Politics in a Global Era. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Social movement learning through coalition-building
- I am interested in how social activists learn from each other in the process of coalition-building. I'm engaged in an ongoing project that documents the emergence of powerful coalitions opposing free trade in Canada during the 1980s. These coalitions included a range of actors, including labour unions, feminist activists, religious communities, indigenous groups, and others. Through the collection of oral histories and related ephemera, this research sets out to develop a public archive documenting the experiences of those who were involved, and exploring how they developed new ways of generating and sharing knowledge through the course of the struggle that, in many ways, anticipated the rise of popular movements through the 1990s and early 2000s.

Selected publications:
* Hurl, C. and Christensen, B. Introduction: Reflections on the Struggle Against the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), 30 years later. Socialist Studies / Etudes Socialistes, 15(1): 1-18.