Research
Through a strong and committed faculty, a dynamic master’s program and doctoral program, the School of Child and Youth Care has made significant contributions to the health and well-being of communities within British Columbia, Canada and internationally.
Our faculty and students contribute to and collaborate on the work of many research centres, individual research projects and engage in other collaborations.
Doris Kakuru recognized by the Royal Society of Canada
Dr. Doris Kakuru is a social scientist renowned for child and youth empowerment, childhood studies, critical race theories, and decoloniality. Kakuru's research aims to amplify the voices of young individuals and their unique challenges. Her expertise in childhood studies examines the dynamics that shape children's lives, education and well-being, fostering a deeper understanding of the crucial early stages of human development. Her exploration of how racial and colonial legacies intersect with contemporary structures sheds light on the ongoing struggles for equity and social transformation. Kakuru thrives at the intersection of academia and activism, advocating for positive change.
Respectfully honouring children and young people’s stories as their own requires dismantling adult privilege/adultism and acts of oppression. A basic necessity for holistic well-being entails providing the space and freedom for children and young people to think, act and express themselves without political and social limitations.
Research Spotlight
Dr. Jennifer White
Current research/scholarship activities
Dr. Jennifer White's scholarship is focused on elaborating and extending possibilities for thinking about and ‘doing’ youth suicide prevention in ways that go beyond individualized, medicalized and de-politicized approaches. As one of the founding members of the international network of critical suicide studies and Dr. White's work is focused on articulating a range of alternatives for understanding and responding to suicide in ways that are collaborative, creative, ethical, relational, communal, and political.
Dr. White primarily engages with practitioners, persons with lived/living experience of suicidality, community members, activists, and policy makers. The types of questions that animate her research include:
- When suicide is no longer conceptualized as an individual, de-contextualized act, what types of relational, collective, political, and communal strategies might get mobilized in response?
- Whose knowledge about the problem of suicide is centred and how can we expand and diversify our knowledge base to allow multiple possibilities for understanding to proliferate?
When we start from the premise that we are interdependent and co-constituted (with each other, the land, non-human others), what is our collective responsibility for creating conditions of liveability for a more sustainable future for all?
Through her research Dr. White is addressing many community needs and concerns, including youth mental health; youth suicide; community well-being; care-centred politics; social justice and the pursuit of decolonial and liveable futures for all.
Impacts of Dr. Jennifer White's research
By writing practice guidelines and supplemental documents for the Child and Youth Policy Team, BC Ministry for Child and Family Development, Dr. White's work has been influential in shaping the practices of child and youth care practitioners and mental health service providers when responding to young people who express suicidal despair.
Also as co-lead to the Wise Practices for Life Promotion website, Dr. White's team has showcased a range of practical, community-led, youth-centred, culturally sound, strategies that support engagements with living for Indigenous youth.
Dr. Alison Gerlach
Dr. Alison Gerlach is a White settler who immigrated from the UK over 30 years ago and holds herself accountable to the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island including the stewards of the land that she occupies. Dr Gerlach’s program of critically informed, praxis-oriented, and community-engaged research and scholarship aims to inform how the structure and delivery of community-based early years and child disability systems of care can be inclusive of and responsive to families whose lived experiences include colonial violence, racialization, and discrimination. Her research explicitly attends to the historical and political contexts within which complex issues of inequity and exclusion are situated. Dr Gerlach has partnered with provincial, national, and international government and non-profit organizations on informing systems transformation. For information on her knowledge outputs see: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alison-Gerlach
More details of our faculty's research can be found on their individual faculty profiles