School of Social Work

"Going Home (?): Social Work Across and About Borders"

Three professors from the Ryerson University School of Social Work share their views and experiences related to international social work.  Dr Purnima George, Dr Iara Lessa and Dr Henry Parada provide a critical discussion of the challenges, tensions and lessons involved in engaging with international work. The film was created in 2012 by Dr Samantha Wehbi, Associate Professor at the Ryerson School of Social Work.  

Link: http://youtu.be/yCIWftDsPNo

Can the Indian in the child ever speak?: The production of the residential school survivor in media discourse in Canada

A Research Paper presented by visiting scholar and Ryerson School of Social Work Alumnus, Dr. Teresa Macias, Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, University of Victoria.

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Dr. Macias’ scholarship deals with issues of disappearances, torture, truth commissions and compensation policy. Her research and teaching interests also include ethics of international development and practice, nation and identity making, and anti-oppressive an

Research Paper Abstract
In 2009 Canada instituted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (TRC) as an independent body with the mandate to acknowledge “residential school experiences, impacts and consequences”; provide those affected with a “holistic and culturally appropriate” opportunity to share their stories and/or experiences; and facilitate “reconciliation among former students, their families, their communities and all Canadians”. The TRC is a key component of the 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement between the Canadian government and survivors of residential schools. As a result of the TRC, stories of survivors and of residential schools have proliferated in Canadian media providing us with images and narratives about this dark episode in Canadian history. This paper uses a Foucaultian discourse analysis approach, and a post-colonial and critical race theory framework to explore the process by which media reports surrounding the TRC capture residential school experiences and use them to produce images of residential school survivors, narratives about residential schools and their role in Canadian history. Three main questions guide this analysis: who is the residential school survivor that speaks through the media and how is that survivor discursively produced? What are survivors allowed to say and what is it that they cannot say about the history of residential schools? And, what kind of national narratives are made possible through the discursive production of residential school survivors in media discourses?
d anti-colonial practice and teaching methods. Her professional and academic experience include 4 years of international development and research work in Latin America as well as life-long involvement in international human rights work, community activism and popular education.

Mommyblogs as non-traditional parenting text

On February 8, 2012, Dr. May Friedman will participate as a guest speaker in the Ryerson Midwifery Education Program Speaker Series. For more information please click here.

Message from the Chair

Dr. Winnie Ng, Sam Ginding Chair in Social Justice and Democracy

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School of Social Work Faculty