Dr. Pat MacKenzie
I joined the School as an Associate Professor in July 1999. Prior to coming to UVic, I spent 11 years as an Associate Professor and Director of the Saskatoon Community Education Center at the University of Regina. I also practiced as social worker in Victoria from 1974 to 1988. I studied at UBC (MSW) and the University of Edinburgh (PhD). I teach in both the undergraduate and graduate programs of the School and have been appointed as a research affiliate at the Centre on Aging. My primary research interests are in the area of health care, aging, community work and rural practice.
My earlier research focused on older women's experiences of growing older "in place". A constant focus of my research is to examine the various caregiving and care receiving arrangements that exist in intergenerational families. Engaging in the grandmothers project allows me to work do collaborative research with members of the community at large as well with my colleagues in the Research Initiatives for Social Change Unit at the University of Victoria.
Dr. Leslie Brown
I have been a member of the Child, Family and Community Research Project for several years, working extensively in First Nation's communities on topics of governance, child welfare and community development with First Nations' peoples such as the Mowchaht, Ehattesaht and Wet'suwet'en. I have continued this inquiry in work for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and in my doctoral dissertation. My teaching focus has been on research methods, particularly to First Nations graduate students. At present I am completing a case study of child welfare practices in one First Nation community on Vancouver Island. This study reveals many situations in this community where grandmothers care for their grandchildren.
Professor Barbara Whittington
My interest in this subject has arisen from my family practice over the past twenty years where kinship care is a commonly used as parents undergo stress and crisis, from my current practice in the Family Center on the university campus and from recent research on multidisciplinary family practice. Another area of scholarly work over the past fifteen years has focused upon feminist thinking in sexual harassment practice and policy and this project will continue my interest in ensuring that policy reflects feminist thinking and uses feminist approaches to develop and implement policy.
Dr. Marilyn Callahan
This study arises from four previous studies carried out by myself and colleagues in the CFCEU over the last five years (Callahan, Hooper and Wharf 1997; Rutman et al 2000; Callahan, Field, Hubberstey and Wharf 1998; and Callahan and Dominelli in press). In these four studies, we have interview 140 mothers about a third of whom were First Nations women, and almost all of whom used kinship networks to help them raise their children. We were surprised to learn the extent to which they left their children with grandmothers on a regular or intermittent basis during particularly difficult periods in their own lives or as daily occurrence. None of these studies focused upon the experience of grandmothers, nor were we able to find any Canadian studies that examined this invisible aspect of child welfare work.
Gayle Ployer, MSW
My interest in the caring work performed by women has been informed and shaped by my personal experiences in a rural farming community and family life. For instance, I found it interesting that my brother was able to meet his parental obligations as outlined in his joint custody arrangement, because my mother, and grandmother had been unquestionably available to provide regular unpaid child care. During my graduate studies in social policy, I focused my work on exploring the links between women's unpaid work, women's poverty and social welfare policy. As such, I am interested in revealing the multiple ways in which women take on caring roles and responsibilities, more specifically how this relates to the social construction of grandmothering, and in examining the role of social welfare policy in maintaining such relations.
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