Sessional Lecturers
CUPE 4163 Members
Marina Bochar, MSW (UVic)
Email: mbochar@uvic.ca
Marina (she/her) grew up on Treaty 6 territory (Edmonton) and is of Romanian, Polish, and Ukrainian ancestry. She is a fourth-generation settler currently living out her great grandparent’s settlement on Turtle Island on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Marina completed a Masters in Social Work at UVic in 2021 and has 9 years of experience working in the social services field, where she has worked closely with youth experiencing sexual exploitation, sex workers, and folks experiencing gender-based violence. Marina currently works at First Nations Health Authority as a Project Manager on the Toxic Drug Response Team. Marina has a passion for harm reduction, and providing supports and programing that are peer led, culturally safe, and community based. In her spare time, you can find her walking along the river with her two rescue pups, Juniper & Lilah, or at the gym learning powerlifting.
Michele Fairbairn, Ph.D. Candidate (MUN)
Email: fairbair@uvic.ca
Michele joined the school as a Sessional Lecturer in 2009. She teaches in both the BSW and MSW programs. Her teaching and research interests include: decolonial and antiracist policy and social work practice, research methodologies, social work identity; and the application of colonial and neoliberal governmentality, queer, Indigenous, critical race, and feminist theories.
Michele has completed narrative research with child welfare social workers who were in state care as children or were investigated as mothers. Her current research is a poststructuralist analysis of social work legal regulatory reforms in settler colonial nation-states.
https://mun.academia.edu/MicheleFairbairn
Kim Grzybowski, MSW (UVic)
Email: kimg@uvic.ca
Kim accepts academic reference requests from previous students who have taken a course with her.
Jodi Hoffman 
Email: jodih@uvic.ca
Jodi accepts academic, employment and RSW registration reference requests from previous students who have taken a course with her.
Sharnelle Jenkins-Thompson, MSW (UVic)
Email: sharnelleleigh@uvic.ca
Tyson Kelsall, MSW (McGill), PhD Candidate (SFU)
Email: tkelsall@uvic.ca
Tyson Singh joined the UVic School of Social Work in 2021 as a sessional lecturer. He otherwise works in Vancouver's DTES as an outreach and case managing social worker for Vancouver Coastal Health.
His social work-related interests are broad but include examining how biopolitics exclude people from dignified social services, healthcare and housing; police accountability; harm reduction and limitations of the state; as well as anti-racism and grounding social work practice in an anti-colonial worldview.
Vanessa Key Craig, BSW, MSW RSW
Email: vkey@uvic.ca
Vanessa (she/her) identifies as a biracial cisgender woman, who is a settler on the lands of Treaty 8 territory and the traditional homelands of the Cree, Dane-Zaa, Saulteau, Sikanni and Slavey First Nations. Vanessa works to re-imagine a social work practice rooted in critical reflexivity, anti-oppressive practice, and decolonial practice. Her practice is founded on intersectionality and anti-oppressive practice, as inspired by positioning and accountability to the past-present-future. Currently, Vanessa supports communities through private practice. She has been studying decolonizing social work practices since 2010 and continues this learning journey currently through graduate study in Art Therapy.
Jennifer Lavalley, MSW, PhD (UVic)
Email: jlavalley@uvic.ca
Jen (she/her) is a Two-Spirit/queer, nêhiyaw-Saulteaux Métis scholar from Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan and a registered member of Piapot First Nation. She is currently living on the lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, including the Songhees and Xʷsepsəm (Esquimalt) Nations. Jennifer completed her PhD in early 2025 and has over 15 years of experience of front-line social work practice where she has worked closely with youth involved with the criminal (in)justice system, sex workers, and people who use drugs. Her research focuses on substance use, harm reduction, resurgence, and Indigenous and decolonial methodologies. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, she is working with Indigenous Peoples who use illicit drugs to co-create culturally safe drug checking practices and technologies. Outside of work, she can often be found adventuring with her dog, Goose, sitting on a beach, or reading.
Phil Mach, MSW, RCSW
Email: pmach@uvic.ca
Phil Mach is a Registered Clinical Social Worker who practices on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ nations. He current works within Island Health as a Manager of Professional Practice, where he supports professional regulation and standards, policy creation, governance, and strategic initiatives. He also serves as the President for the BC Association of Social Workers, and provides counselling and psychotherapy in private practice. His areas of practice include health profession regulation, policy analysis, mental health and substance use, social work leadership, and supporting those who have experienced trauma.
SOCW312B: Anti-Racist Social Work (Fall 2025)
SOCW356: Global Approaches to Human Development and Social Justice (Fall 2023)
Alyx MacAdams, MSW (UVic)
Email: alyxm@uvic.ca
Alyx (they/them) MSW is a trans-masculine queer person of Gaelic Scottish, Irish, and British ancestry. In community, they work with and alongside trans children and their families through community-based programs and a counselling practice. Their practice and teaching approaches are inspired by trans studies, transformative justice, decarceral politics, grassroots activism.
In the classroom, they invite somatic awareness and nature-based learning to get curious about decolonial and relational approaches to social work practice. They have taught courses in Social Work, Child and Youth Care and Gender Studies at UVic. They have been a Field Lisaison Instructor and are teaching SOCW 312A in the Fall of 2025.
Kirsten Mikkelsen, MSW (UVic)
Email: km28@uvic.ca
Michele Morin, MSW (UVic)
Email: michelemorin@uvic.ca
Michele is a Métis woman—daughter, mother, sister, auntie, cousin, friend, and scholar. She is a proud member of her Métis community and a traditional knowledge keeper. Michele practices Two World Walking and Two-Eyed Seeing, working diligently to balance a contemporary Métis lifestyle with Eurocentric academia. She is an Indigenous Social Work instructor at the University of Victoria’s School of Social Work and also teaches Indigenous Studies at Selkirk College in Castlegar, BC. Her research interests are wide-ranging, but they share a common thread: the sharing of multiple knowledges, epistemologies, axiologies, and ontologies. Through this work, Michele aims to honour and advance decolonization through educational change.
Nellie Alcaraz, BSW (UVic), MSW (Calgary), PhD Candidate (McGill)
Email: nalcaraz@uvic.ca
With a degree in Political Science, Nellie came to Canada from the Philippines under the federal live-in caregiver program. She has been a community organizer and a migrant rights advocate for more than a decade. She is a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University’s School of Social Work. Her doctoral research looks at the experiences of non-status migrants in Canada. Nellie completed her Master of Social Work at the University of Calgary and her Bachelor of Social Work at the University of Victoria.
In 2021, Nellie received the John Hutton Memorial Award from the Alberta College of Social Workers and in 2019, she was given the Clarice Chodak Social Justice and Action Award by University of Calgary’s Faculty of Social Work. Since 2020, Nellie has been an appointed member of the City of Calgary's Anti-Racism Action Committee. Nellie has been a practicing social worker for more than a decade in the field of disability, child and family services with a particular focus in Indigenous population.
When not in the community or academic spaces, Nellie can be found scaling and hiking the mountains of Alberta to reconnect with herself and the natural world.
Todd Ormiston, BSW, MPA, Ph.D
Email: toddo@shaw.ca
Trish Pal, MSW (UVic)
Email: trishpal@uvic.ca
Kîwetinohk Kîsik/Trish Pal (they/them) is a 2Spirit non-binary person of Red River Métis and mixed Euro-settler ancestry with an MSW-I. They currently reside at Amiskwaciywâskahikan, (Beaver Hills House, "Edmonton") in Treaty 6. Their scholarship focuses on connecting colonial violences including bodily violences and land-based violences. They work from a decolonial harm reduction lens, centering self-determination, consent, relationship, and accessibility. They have spent many years supporting survivors of many kinds of violence including Indigenous folks using illicit substances as the co-creator of the Indigenous Harm Reduction Team (ihrt.ca). They teach SOCW 435 -Decolonial & Anti-Oppressive Perspectives on Mental Health and
SOCW 471 - Substance Use Theory, Policy, and Practice in Social Work.
Sarina Piercy, MSW (UVic)
Email: snpiercy@uvic.ca
Her teaching is rooted in relational and decolonial pedagogies, with a focus on nurturing collaborative curiosity around the gifts we carry and those we aspire to develop. Whenever appropriate, she weaves in holistic practices to support students in cultivating a balanced, embodied learning experience.
In addition to her teaching role, Sarina offers nature-based counselling through her private practice, Shapeshift Counselling, and is an active member of a local mutual-aid BIPOC doula collective. A proud parent of two young children, Sarina finds joy in the messy, beautiful moments of gardening, hiking, and being on the land with her family.
She currently teaches SOCW 350A.
Tracy Rapanos (Schonfeld), MSW (Dalhousie)
Email: trapanos@uvic.ca
Corrina Sparrow, MSW, PhD Candidate (UBC)
Email: lokwa00@uvic.ca
Leanne Stepp, MSW (UVic)
Email: leanneg@uvic.ca
Leanne is interested in decolonizing health care, health equity in addictions treatment, and the use of narrative therapy in supporting others.
Some of the courses she has taught include 200A & 200B: Introductions to Social Work and Social Policy; 311: Understanding Oppression; 312: Collaborative Conversations; 319: Research for Social Change; 400/532: Introduction to Social Work in Health care; 471: Addictions in Society; 512: Knowledge and Inquiry. Occasionally, she also takes students on for field education learning opportunities in the health authority.
Leanne enjoys creative writing, triathlon training and racing, and spending time with her two kids and her wonderful circle of friends.
Glen Tadsen, BA (SFU), MSW (UBC)
Email: glent@uvic.ca
I've been a Lecturer here at UVic for many years in addition to a 30 year career in government in social policy and program development - at times acting as BC director of income assistance, employment and training and disaster response planning. In my early career, I was a child protection worker, a District Supervisor, Coordinator of BC's Income Assistance Appeal system, Minister's liaison to the cooperative community and an Ombudsman's Officer.
Courses taught: 200B - Introduction to the Critical Analysis of Social Welfare in Canada and 350A - Social Work, Social Justice and the Law. Working at the School all these years has been the best job ever.
I have three adult kids and five grandkids.
In my spare time, I like to go fishing - or at least think about going fishing.
I accept academic and employment reference requests from previous students who have taken a course with me.
Chris Tse, MSW (UVic)
Email: christophertse@uvic.ca