Creative Teamwork
Developing Rapid, Site-Switching Ethnography
Edited by Pat Armstrong and Ruth Lowndes
Author Information
Pat Armstrong, PhD, MA, is Professor of Sociology and of Women's Studies at York University, Toronto. She held a Canada Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institute of Health Research Chair in Health Services, is a Distinguished Research Professor in Sociology and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Focusing on the fields of social policy, of women, work, feminist theory and the health and social services, she has published widely, co-authoring more than a dozen books and co-editing another dozen. For over a decade, she was Chair of Women and Health Care Reform, a group funded by Health Canada, Her current research is focused on reimagining long-term residential care, a Major Collaborative Research Project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Ruth Lowndes, DPhil, MN, is currently engaged full time in the "Re-magining Long-term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices" MCRI. Ruth's doctoral ethnographical study used observation and interviewing, methods which extend into this current project. She is also registered with the College of Nurses of Ontario and is a Certified Diabetes Educator.
Contributors:
Dr. Pat Armstrong is Professor of Sociology and of Sexuality and Women's Studies at York University, Toronto. She held a Canada Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institute of Health Research Chair in Health Services, is a Distinguished Research Professor in Sociology and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology, York University and Director of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. Focusing on the fields of social policy, of women, work and the health and social services, she has published widely, co-authoring more than a dozen books and co-editing another dozen, as well as many journal and technical reports. She was Chair of Women and Health Care Reform, a group funded for more than a decade by Health Canada. She is currently Principal investigator of a seven-year SSHRC-funded project on "Re-imagining Long-term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices" and Coordinator of a smaller one embedded within it on "Healthy Ageing in Residential Places."
Dr. Hugh Armstrong is a Professor Emeritus and a Distinguished Research Professor with the School of Social Work and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. His major research interests include long-term care, the political economy of healthcare, unions and public policy, the organization of work, and family and household structures. Hugh Armstrong brings expertise on work organization and experience from serving on the Hospital Restructuring Committee of Metro Toronto's District Health Council, as Vice-Chair of the Ottawa-Carleton CCAC, as Chair of the Health Issues Committee of the Council on Aging of Ottawa, and as a research coordinator with the Ontario Federation of Labour. Accountability was his central concern on the Steering Committee establishing the Champlain Local Health Integration Network. With Pat Armstrong he has authored such books as Wasting Away: The Undermining of Canadian Health Care (2010) and Critical to Care: the Invisible Women in Health Services (2008).
Dr. Donna Baines is a Professor at the University of Sydney, Australia in the Faculty of Education and Social Work. She comes to social work and social policy having taught labour studies and social work at McMaster University in Canada for the past 15 years. Her research focuses on paid and unpaid care work, restructuring in the social services sector, and anti-oppressive social work practice. Professor Baines' favorite method at the moment is rapid ethnography in care workplaces, and she is currently involved in three international, funded research projects using this method. Dr. Baines has published on care work in the Journal of Social Work, Critical Social Policy and Journal of Industrial Relations, among other venues. She is working on the third edition of her best-selling (in Canada) edited collection, Doing Anti-Oppressive Practice, Social Justice Social Work (Fernwood, 2016), and the 7th edition of the now co-authored Canadian social work classic text, Case Critical. Social Services and Social Justice (with Ben Carniol, Raven Sinclair and Banakonda Kennedy-Kish Bell, Between the Lines, 2016). She teaches in social justice, social policy, labour markets and critical practice.
Dr. Susan Braedley is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Dr. Braedley's research focuses on the political, economic and cultural construction of contemporary care relations and their implications for equity. Her current research takes up questions of care and aging in light of welfare state change. She is co-editor with Meg Luxton of Neoliberalism and Everyday Life (2010) and with Pat Armstrong, Troubling Care: Critical Perspectives on Research and Practices (2013).
Dr. Sally Chivers is a Professor in the Departments of Canadian Studies and English at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. The author of From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women's Narratives (2003) and The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in the Cinema (2011), and the co-editor of The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film (2010), Dr. Chivers maintains a research focus on the relationship between aging and disability in the Canadian public sphere and beyond from an interdisciplinary perspective. Committed to old age as a vital category of analysis, she has published a number of essays on disability and aging in film and television, as well as pieces on aging in auto/biography, the Canadian disability movement, disability in the Canadian public sphere, the image of the wounded warrior, and long-term care in the cultural imagination.
Dr. Jacqueline A. Choiniere is a Registered Nurse and an Associate Professor with the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, at York University. Jacqueline Choiniere served as the Director of Policy and Research for the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario where she led two health ministry-funded initiatives, involving physician and nursing organizations exploring promising practices, addressing key challenges and enhancing collaboration between nurse practitioners and family physicians. Her primary areas of research include health policy, women's work and health, health-care reform, and accountability and political economy.
Dr. Tamara J. Daly is an Associate Professor with the School of Health Policy & Management, Faculty of Health, at York University and York's Faculty of Graduate Studies programs in Critical Disability Studies, Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and Health Policy & Equity. She is also the CIHR Chair in Gender, Work and Health. Her research focuses on health care work, aging and long-term care policy, and gender and health policy.
Dr. Suzanne Day completed her PhD in the Department of Sociology at York University in 2015. Her doctoral research examined the decision-making of frontline care workers in long-term residential care, and was supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with Women's Xchange, a women's health knowledge translation and exchange centre based at Women's College Hospital in Toronto. Her areas of research include gender in health and long-term care, care work and working conditions, and qualitative methodology.
Krystal Kehoe MacLeod is a PhD candidate in the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. Krystal has a Master of Public Policy and Administration degree from Ryerson University (2007), a Bachelor of Arts specialization in Development Studies (2005) and an Honour's Bachelor of Science specialization in Life Sciences (2004) from Queen's University. Prior to commencing doctoral studies, Krystal worked as a policymaker with the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, the Cabinet Office in Ontario and the Department of Health in New South Wales, Australia. Krystal is an Ontario Women's Health Scholar Award winner with research funding from the Canadian Policy Research Network. Krystal's primary research interests include home care, integrated care, and the linkages between gender, aging and public policy.
Dr. Ruth Lowndes is a Research Associate at York University, currently engaging full time in research-related work in long-term care within the "Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices" interdisciplinary study. She is also registered with the College of Nurses of Ontario and is a Certified Diabetes Educator. Ruth Lowndes brings with her ethnographic method experience, having used Institutional Ethnography as her method of inquiry in doctoral studies to explore diabetes care in a vulnerable population of adults with severe mental illness who reside in a group home setting. She also has managerial experience, having previously been clinical coordinator and diabetes educator in a community hospital. Additionally, Ruth Lowndes worked in the long-term care sector.
Dr. Martha MacDonald is a Professor of Economics with the Department of Economics at the Sobey School of Business at St. Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Dr. MacDonald is also currently involved with the Women's Studies and Atlantic Canada Studies programs. Her areas of specialization include economic restructuring, gender and the economy, social security policy and restructuring in rural Atlantic Canada.
Sandra Smele is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department of York University. She obtained her Master of Arts degree in Sociology (2008) and Bachelor of Arts specialization in Sociology (2005) at Concordia University. Her research interests focus on the historicization of disability in Canada, particularly intellectual and developmental disability, and on contemporary personalization policy orientations in developmental services and related social care sectors. She is also conducting research on sexual abuse policies and practices in these sectors and on how the criminal justice system responds to reports of sexual abuse involving those identified as intellectually or developmentally disabled.
Derek Newman-Stille is a PhD student at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, where he examines representations of disability in Canadian Speculative Fiction. Derek has published articles in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe: Examining Disability in the Historical, Legal, Literary, Medical, and Religious Discourses, The Canadian Fantastic in Focus, and Quill & Quire. He has given academic papers at conferences such as the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association, and the Canadian Popular Culture Association. Derek is also the Aurora Award Winning creator of Speculating Canada (www.speculatingcanada.ca
), a digital humanities website devoted to the exploration of Canadian Speculative Fiction.
Palle Storm has a Masters degree in Social Work and is currently a PhD student in the Department of Social Work at Stockholm University, Sweden. He also teaches courses on gender and elder care and migration at Stockholm University within the Department of Social Work. His research interests include gender and ethnicity in the everyday life of care in nursing homes.
Dr. James Struthers is a Professor Emeritus in Canadian Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Dr. Struthers is also a member of the Trent Centre for Aging and Society. His research interests include aging and long-term care policy, growth and regulation of private and public nursing homes, evolution of home care policies, modern Canadian social welfare history and veterans and Canadian social policy.
Dr. Marta Szebehely is a Professor of Social Work and Social Care with the Department of Social Work at Stockholm University in Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Szebehely's research interests include gender, social policy and care, everyday life perspectives on home-based and residential care, and living conditions and use of care among elderly and disabled people. She has been partnering and leading several Nordic and international comparative research projects on eldercare, ethnographic as well as social policy oriented projects.
Wendy Winters has been the administrator for the SSHRC MCRI "Re-imagining Long-term Residential Care" project since funding was awarded in 2010. She was formerly Coordinator at the Institute for Health Research at York University, and in this capacity was the financial administrator for Dr. Pat Armstrong's CHSFR/CIHR Chair in Health Services and Nursing Research, and for the National Network on Environments and Women's Health. She has worked with Dr. Armstrong for over 15 years.
