Many people remain invisible in all stages of policymaking processes and are re/harmed by policy decisions made in their absence, even where public engagement has occurred. This lack of meaningful engagement affects those experiencing homelessness, migrant workers, northern and Indigenous women, and others with whom we have collaborated. This article demonstrates the transformative potential of recognising these ‘invisible’ actors as legitimate and effective actors in the policy process. In this article, we present a series of Canadian research vignettes, emerging from our empirical research programmes, that illuminate the possibilities for the principles of engaged scholarship to advance transformative, community-driven policymaking. Along with other critical policy scholars, we are concerned about how power circulates and is distributed unequally through public policy. Our focus in on how commitments manifested through engaged scholarship can disrupt these power distributions. Through our vignettes, we demonstrate how principles of engaged scholarship can shape public engagement, the understanding of policy problems, the creation of evidence, and the development of meaningful policy solutions. This article makes an important contribution on how to improve the processes of public engagement in policy development.

To date there has been little consideration of the role of housing programs in conditioning the intimate lives of people living with mental illness labels. This article employs a Feminist Political Economy lens with insights from Mad & Disability Studies to interrogate the intimate constraints experienced by some residents in high-support mental health housing in Ontario, Canada. It demonstrates that long-standing medicalized notions of mental illness and system-wide anxiety over the social and financial costs of the reproduction of disabled bodies give rise to these intimate constraints, specifically limitations and control over biological reproduction and parenting practices. In this way, the mechanisms of intimate constraint within high-support housing are not merely holdovers from a time gone by, but are rather part of a mental health care system guided by the principles of neoliberalism under which neo-eugenics is regularly enacted. This is a timely contribution, as the province of Ontario is currently planning to expand the supportive housing system within which highsupport housing is situated and because high-support housing in Ontario is rarely studied in relation to feminist political economy and/or mental health care. This article draws on documentary review of governmental and third-sector materials and 38 semi-structured interviews with service providers and residents in the high-support housing system in Ontario. It situates intimate constraints within the long history of eugenics and neo-eugenics in Ontario and Canada, and the classed, raced, and gendered hierarchy of human bodies that is taking on new forms under neoliberalism.

The study of transinstitutionalization necessarily varies by context. In this issue we guard against misconceptions that institutionalization is an action that took place in the past, whose loose ends we are now trying to tie together and where contemporary institutionalizing conditions are merely legacies that will, in time, fade away. To think of institutionalization as something of the past is to gently scratch its surface. And, given the wide breadth of transinstitutionalization and the many lives and stories it encompasses, we are aware of the limitations of covering this vast topic in one special issue. Yet, following a call to include disability in developing new approaches to understanding modernity (Van Trigt, 2019), our aim with this collection is to gather the latest research and reflections on transinstitutionalization as a topic that can take flight in our theoretical and cultural imaginations, a topic that can help us transcend the dangers of “theoretical complacency” that come with imagining the ongoing as a past, one-time thing (Bauman, 2000, p. 3).

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