Mandeep Kaur Mucina

Dr. Mandeep Kaur Mucina is an Assistant Professor in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria. Mandeep has worked in the human services sector as a child and youth worker and social worker for 20 years. During this time she has worked as a child protection worker, violence against women counsellor and has been active in community engagement work with migrant families. Mandeep did her undergraduate degree in child and youth care and has a Masters in Social work from the University of Toronto. Mandeep has also worked as a practitioner, educator, researcher, and community educator in Victoria, Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax and has sat on various boards across Canada.

Practice, research and teaching background

Over the course of 20 years, Mandeep has worked with children, youth and families in various contexts. Mandeep first began working in after school care programs and in youth programming in Victoria. After completing her Bachelor’s degree, Mandeep worked as a child protection worker in Vancouver on the Aboriginal family services team, caring for Indigenous children and youth in care, and working with Indigenous families towards reunification. During this transformative time, Mandeep began working with women and girls involved in child protection who were survivors of family, domestic, and sexualized violence. Hearing and engaging with women and girls stories of violence, Mandeep was inspired by the resiliency and resistance they continued to demonstrate in their lives and wanted to work further in the gender based violence sector, which led her to pursue her Masters in Social Work (MSW) to further her work and knowledge in the field. After completing her MSW she began working with migrant families struggling with family violence, and more specifically young girls struggling with “honour” related violence in their everyday lives. Mandeep went back to complete her doctorate in Adult Education and Community Development at OISE, the University of Toronto, here she focused her research and work on “honour” related violence in the South Asian Diaspora and gathered life histories of women who encountered “honour” related violence, yet continued to resist, reclaim, and transgress boundaries of “honour” throughout their lives. Since completing her doctorate, Mandeep has been teaching in both Social Work and Child and Youth care at various major universities across Canada.

Research and scholarly interests

Mandeep’s research and social justice work focuses on family violence, gender-based violence, understanding the role of trauma in migration, and exploring second-generation immigrant youth’s stories of resistance, identity, and encounters with racism in the diaspora, all from a feminist anti-racist, anti-colonial lens.

Mandeep has in depth experience conducting life histories with racialized women and girls, action based research, and thinking through practice implications for social service workers; furthermore, using narrative inquiry and autoethnography in her research and writing. Mandeep’s future research hopes to explore the intersection between migration, trauma and encounters with child protection for refugee children, youth and families. Furthermore, she will be expanding her research on “honour” related violence by exploring gun violence in South Asian communities in British Columbia.