Uniting the voices of twenty-two experts from academic, government, and civil sectors who study and help search for missing persons in Canada and internationally, Derek Congram’s new collection responds to growing public awareness of persons who have disappeared due to armed conflict, repressive regimes, criminal behaviour, and racist and colonial policies towards Indigenous persons and minority populations.

Missing Persons centres its attention on the people who seek others, and explores how scientists, law-enforcement agents, and researchers serve and relate to those who miss. This multidisciplinary volume both attends to the varied circumstances of disappearance and illustrates how disparate contexts connect, making for a valuable comparative resource in criminology and forensic anthropology, science, and psychology classrooms.

Derek Congram's profile page

Derek Congram is a Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Toronto and an independent forensic consultant. As an anthropologist and archaeologist, he has worked in 20 countries for families of missing persons, universities, governments, and international organizations, including the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. His teaching, research, and consulting focus on disappeared persons—victims of physical and structural violence.

“Derek Congram has created an important resource for methodologists, applied researchers, and students alike. This well-written edited volume provides coverage of a number of important issues relating to missing persons who may have been victims of criminal acts. Its breadth and scope and the variety of data explored will provoke both thought and emotion. This text helps us think more clearly about important issues in relation to people who go missing in areas such as armed conflict, repressive regimes, and mass fatality incidents, as well as the dedicated effort to find and identify their remains.”
—Dr. Karen Shalev Greene, Director of the Centre for the Study of Missing Persons, University of Portsmouth

“This book’s multidisciplinary perspective makes it a valuable reference for anyone interested in the study of the missing and disappeared. The integration of multiple perspectives, contexts, and methods in this text is refreshing, and the chapters on Canadian contexts remind us that we have our own sad history of missing individuals, many of whom remain yet to be found and identified.”
—Dr. Anne Keenleyside, Faculty of Anthropology, Trent University

“Missing Persons provides multi-dimensional perspectives on the missing, examining the viewpoints of the relatives of the missing, of society as a whole, and of the scientists who search for the disappeared. The contributions from international experts exemplify issues surrounding family support, trauma, and the identification of the deceased. The case studies, which span different geographical areas and chronological periods, bring a message of hope in their portrayal of the many efforts to find the missing and bring them justice.”
—Dr. Nicholas Marquez-Grant, Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology, Cranfield University