Prospective Graduate Students / Postdocs
This faculty member is currently not actively recruiting graduate students or Postdoctoral Fellows, but might consider co-supervision together with another faculty member.
This faculty member is currently not actively recruiting graduate students or Postdoctoral Fellows, but might consider co-supervision together with another faculty member.
Injury is the leading cause of death and disability among Canadians and kills more children and young people than all other causes combined. The cost of injury is tremendous, estimated at some $19.6 billion annually in Canada. Injury prevention offers one of the most promising ways of reducing deaths, hospitalizations and related health care costs.
Injury often takes a back seat to less serious health concerns, because people believe that injuries are "accidents" or "fate," – an inevitable part of life –
and can neither be predicted nor prevented. Most injuries, however, have distinct patterns and are, therefore, predictable and preventable. Where good prevention efforts have been introduced, there have been significant reductions in disability and loss of life, such as with mandatory seat belt and child passenger restraint laws.
BC Injury Research and Prevention Unit (BCIRPU) conducts a comprehensive program of injury surveillance and research that contributes to improved understanding and prevention of injury. BCIRPU is a leader in the development of evidence-based prevention strategies, and has a solid reputation among the provincial, national and international injury prevention communities.
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
In this dissertation I explore the complexity of efforts to make the City of New Westminster more child-friendly and the creative capacities associated with these efforts. Over a period of two years, I carried out a participatory study related with the newly adopted New Westminster Child and Youth Friendly Community (CYFC) Strategy. The study involved a collaboration between 51 children, myself, adult community members, and other (human and nonhuman) bodies in a project focused on outdoor neighbourhood play. As part of this, I also interviewed 21 people who were involved in developing and implementing the CYFC strategy. In the process of this inquiry, I increasingly took up posthumanist thinking, experimenting with various ways of engaging the questions: How does the New Westminster Child and Youth Friendly Community Strategy work with other related bodies toward change? How might it? I operated with the idea that approaching these questions through posthumanism was not only worthwhile but vital for grappling with the complexities of urban child-friendliness and imperatives to ‘make a difference’ for children in this context. Thus, this research had hybrid qualities, moving from a traditional qualitative orientation toward a more post-qualitative approach. With the idea that child-friendliness is material, discursive, embodied, and situated, this inquiry connected with topics of: outdoor play; children’s travels to and from school; child/youth engagement; urban soundscapes; weather; loitering; multi-species relations; colonial entanglements; ontological politics; and the city as a site of learning. In exploring various realities associated with the CYFC strategy, I considered how the potential for New Westminster to become more child-friendly was entangled with a complex array of more-than-human relations.
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