Bonnie Lashewicz

Biography

Bonnie Lashewicz is a Professor and the Graduate Program Director for Community Health Sciences; she leads a program of qualitative research derived from feminist scholarship views that the power of research lies not only in whose perspectives are heard, but also in the steps through which perspectives are recorded and interpreted.  Bonnie focuses on families navigating and negotiating responsibilities and identities in relation to providing support to members who have disability, mental health disorder and/or chronic disease diagnoses and she strives to record and interrogate “natural ethnographic data” in the forms of expressions about, and enactments of, care relationships. Bonnie gains access to participants by working in partnership with an array of human services agencies in urban and rural settings. Bonnie encompasses in-depth accounts from as many members as are interested and available and, as a result, has an expanding set of multi-perspective data. Her research projects have been funded nationally, provincially and locally and she has a growing reputation for engaging community collaborators and student researchers in all stages of research processes and outcomes. Bonnie’s data, and the research articles and implications driven by her data, are complex and rich and continue to be focused on under-examined topics of ambivalence, decision-making, vulnerability and resilience at the intersection of ability differences, social disablement, health and family. Bonnie’s projects have been funded by SSHRC, CIHR, Alberta Labour: Occupational Health & Safety, The Craig Neilsen Foundation and Policywise and the articles produced through these projects are published in journals devoted to mental health, nursing, social work and disability studies . Bonnie was awarded the Bachelor of Health Sciences Teaching Award in 2017 and the Bachelor of Health Sciences Research Mentor Award in 2014 as well as a Sikh Youth Calgary Research Mentor Award in 2014.