Erin Tichenor
About me
I'm a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Alberta. I grew up in Michigan (United States), on the lands of the Niswi-mishkodewinan (Council of Three Fires) and am a settler of predominantly English and French ancestry. I attended Boston University for my undergraduate degree, where I studied sociology and supported research and community organizing on racial inequity and solitary confinement, imprisonment, and prison re-entry. My thesis explored the intersectional effects of the decriminalization of sex work in Aotearoa (New Zealand), where I did a student internship with a sex workers' rights and emergency housing organization. After graduating, I returned to Aotearoa to work as a case manager in transitional, therapeutic, and Indigenous Māori-focused housing services. I came to amiskwacîwâskahikan and the University of Alberta in 2022 for graduate school, and my Master's research explored the intersectional social dynamics of the borderline personality disorder diagnosis. I currently support research projects in occupational therapy (socio-political praxis in occupational therapy, re-imagining care relationships in the human services) and emergency medicine (anti-racism intervention with First Nations partners, co-creating understandings and definitions of Métis quality of care).
About my work
My dissertation research focuses on the racial and intersectional dimensions of violence and harm in healthcare, and how it traverses across the patient/provider binary and in relationship to institutional and structural harm. More broadly, I am interested in understanding and addressing racial and intersectional harm/oppression/inequity in health, mental health, social service, and criminal legal systems, and I draw from a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to do this.
Email Erin: tichenor@ualberta.ca
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