Sule Tomkinson
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About

Portrait of Sule Tomkinson

Sule Tomkinson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Université Laval, where her work bridges the legal and political study of public administration. She studies administrative justice — how administrative tribunals interpret their mandates, exercise discretion, and deliver, contest, and sometimes fall short of, the justice they promise.

A Turkish-Canadian scholar who works in English, French, and Turkish, she holds a B.A. in Political Science and Public Administration from Bilkent University, an M.A. in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Essex, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Université de Montréal (2015) — where her award-winning ethnographic dissertation on the micro-dynamics of Canada's refugee determination system laid the groundwork for her current research.

Over the past decade she has led a series of projects on administrative justice in Canada and Québec, examining the relationship between individuals and the tribunals that shape their lives — in immigration, human rights, refugee status determination, and social-security benefits. Pairing a political sensibility with close attention to the rule of law, she draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods — courtroom observation, interviews, freedom-of-information requests, and fieldwork inside public institutions — to ask how procedural routines, institutional values, and questions of equity and profiling play out in practice.

She is currently completing a book, The Quest for Administrative Justice in Canada: Tribunals, Values, and Actors, which examines the values held to be at the core of administrative justice and the tribunal actors who define, apply, uphold, and contest them. Alongside her scholarship, she collaborates with tribunals and public bodies — including work on access to administrative justice for marginalized communities — to connect socio-legal research with the institutions it studies.

Her work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Fonds de recherche du Québec, and she is affiliated with the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP), the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la diversité et la démocratie (CRIDAQ), ÉRIQA, and the Observatoire des profilages. At Université Laval she teaches public policy, public administration, and the relationship between law and the public service, and supervises graduate students working across public policy and political sociology.

Education

Policy & applied work

Commissioned research and mandates carried out with tribunals and public bodies.

Research centres & teams

Awards & honours

Funding

Selected grants and research funding.