Spring 2026 Courses

Instructor: Amelia Curran 

This course surveys the contemporary criminal justice system from the initial contact with the offender through initial arrest or charge, prosecution, disposition, incarceration, and release to the community. Emphasis is on the role of the police, prosecution, and corrections as well as their policies and practices relative to the offender. Legal, empirical, and sociological materials will be covered. The aim of the course is to empower students to participate in public discourse about the criminal justice system by developing the skills to ask questions and develop evidence-based positions.

Topics covered:

• The concepts of law, crime, and justice and the role of the criminal justice system.
• The three main purposes of the criminal justice system.
• The levels of government responsible for different parts of the criminal justice system.
• The difference between corrective and distributive justice.
• The main agencies of the criminal justice system (policing, courts, corrections, and the youth justice system) and the most significant challenges in these agencies.
• How criminal law is made and how it is applied through policing, the courts and punishment.
• The different forms of community corrections.

Biography of Instructor

Dr. Amelia Curran received her PhD from the University of Carleton Sociology and Anthropology Department where she wrote her dissertation on gang territories in Winnipeg. Her book, Slipping the Line: the assembled geographies of gang territories was released in 2023 (Palgrave McMillian).

Dr. Curran is currently involved in two research projects. She is the Principal Investigator on a Manitoba Research Alliance/SSHRC-funded project with studying the use, experiences, and implications of bail conditions, (e.g., do-not-attend/no contact/area restrictions, residential conditions, curfews) for marginalized communities in Manitoba, and a second SSHRC-funded project looking at the effect of gang designations on bail and conditions of release, both with researcher Dr. Sarah Zell (Urban and Inner-city Studies, UW).   

Dr. Curran is Co-lead (with Dr. Elizabeth Comack), Justice, Safety, and Security Stream of the Manitoba Research Alliance (MRA) and a Research Associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives–Manitoba (CCPA-MB).

Course number: D55 33050 PTSP1

Class Schedule

Instructor: Mark Meuwese

This course examines how the Aztec and Inca empires and other Indigenous peoples shaped Latin American history from the precolonial era until 1800. 

Topics covered:

• The rise of the Aztec and Inca empires
• The Spanish invasion and colonization of the Caribbean
• The Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires (was it inevitable?)
• Indigenous adaptation and survival in Mexico after the Spanish Conquest
• Indigenous-European relations in colonial Brazil 
• The Catholic Church campaigns against 'idolatry'
• Indigenous resistance in Chile (Mapuche) and northern Mexico (Apaches)
• The 18th century Indigenous rebellions against colonial rule in the Andes (Peru and Bolivia)

Biography of Instructor

Mark Meuwese has been a member of the History faculty at The University of Winnipeg since 2004. His main teaching areas are Indigenous history outside of Canada, European expansion and global interaction, and genocide studies. He is the author and editor of To the Shores of Chile: The ‘Journal and History’ of the Brouwer Expedition to Valdivia in 1643 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).

Course Number: D55 33060 PTSP1

Class Schedule