Tanya Osypowich, MSW

MSW-trained researcher studying how maternal substance use becomes a site of state regulation through the coordinated actions of legal, medical, and social work systems. My work focuses on procedural legibility, risk governance, and the administrative production of carcerality. With experience in qualitative research, harm-reduction practice, and critical policy analysis, I examine how institutional logics shape intervention, surveillance, and disposability. My research is oriented toward mapping structures rather than narrating cases, with attention to precision, pattern recognition, and governance.

Proposed Doctoral Project: Disposability by Design: Triadic Governance, & Administrative Carcerality via Procedural Legibility

• Ivan Franko Scholarship in Ukrainian Language and Literature, University of Toronto, 2019 & 2020
• York Graduate Fellowship and Scholarship Package, York University, 08/01/21, 04/30/24
• High Academic Standing, University of Toronto, 4.0 GPA in final two years.
• High Honours, Humber College ADMH Program, 94% Cumulative Avg.

Proposed Doctoral Project (2024 - Current)

Disposability by Design: Triadic Governance & Administrative Carcerality via Procedural Legibility

• Investigating how law, medicine, and social work function as a coordinated governance apparatus, producing carceral outcomes through routine administrative practices.
• Analyzing procedural legibility (documentation, assessments, risk tools) as a mechanism that structures decision-making and legitimizes intervention, surveillance, or institutional neglect.
• Using maternal substance use as a strategic vantage point because it consistently activates all three systems, revealing the underlying architecture of disposability.
• Advancing a critical feminist and socio-legal framework to theorize administrative carcerality and the structural production of disposability across institutional settings.

Practice-Based Research Paper Scoping Review (2022-2023)

York University, Toronto, ON

War on Women: Motherhood, Substance Use and the COVID-19 Pandemic,

• Conducted under Dr. Gwendolyn Fearing -Afflick, applying Arksey and O'Malley and PRISMA frameworks.

Independent Undergraduate Research (2019-2020)

University of Toronto, ON

Motherhood and the Governance of Substance Use 

• Supervised by Dr. Chandni Desai examining state surveillance and maternal regulation in relation to the Motherisk scandal.

Research Interests

• Maternal regulation, substance-use governance, and carceral logics across health, law, and social work
• Administrative carcerality, procedural legibility, and the documentation practices that structure disposability
• Socio-legal governance of risk, family regulation, and state intervention pathways
• Indigenous sovereignty, settler-colonial state violence, and child-welfare governance
• Harm-reduction policy, perinatal and maternal health systems, and RAAM/acute care pathways

Teaching Interests

• Critical social work theory, abolitionist and anti-carceral frameworks
• Qualitative research methods, discourse analysis, lived-experience epistemologies
• Intersectionality, feminist theory, and structural violence
• Law and social policy, family law, and gendered harms
• Trauma-informed, community-engaged, and anti-oppressive practice

2024

• Advanced Practicum Reflective Analysis (SOWK5935). Critically examined contradictions between EDIA discourse and institutional practice in hospital settings, focusing on how documentation and interprofessional processes reproduce procedural inequities.

2023

• Risk Assessment: An Oppressive Mechanism in the War on Women (SOWK5942). Analyzed risk assessment as a gendered and racialized governance tool that constructs administrative legibility, legitimizes surveillance, and naturalizes maternal state intervention.
• Gendered Harms: Intimate Partner Violence & the Violence of Family Law (SOWK5980). Evaluated how mediation, rights discourse, and procedural neutrality obscure coercive control and enable ongoing harm to women and children within family-law processes.
• Practice-Based Research Paper: War on Women – Motherhood, Substance Use & the COVID-19 Pandemic (SOWK5250E). Scoping review mapping cross-sectoral governance of maternal substance use during COVID-19, identifying coordinated carceral logics across health, legal, and social systems.

2021

• Shattering the Wall (SOWK5030). Integrated feminist, intersectional, and anti-carceral frameworks to critique therapeutic neutrality and reveal how clinical practice participates in broader structures of social regulation.
• Canadian Drug Policy: Critical Analysis (SOWK5040). Assessed prohibitionist policy through a harm-reduction and anti-carceral lens, highlighting how drug governance structures criminalization and maternal surveillance.

2020

• The “War on Drugs” and the Disposability of Racialized Women (NEW341). Examined drug criminalization, child-welfare intervention, and biomedical authority as intersecting mechanisms of racialized maternal regulation and disposability.
• Wet’suwet’en Land Defense: Colonial Violence, Sovereignty & Dispossession (NEW341). Analyzed the RCMP invasion of Wet’suwet’en territory through theories of settler colonialism and state violence, tracing how policing and resource extraction operate as coordinated governance.

2019

• The Genocidal Impact of the Medicalization of Birth (WGS367). Critiqued obstetric authority and reproductive state control, identifying how medical governance produces racialized maternal risk and structural disposability