Articles by Jijian Voronka
Critical Social Work Praxis, S. S. Shaikh, B.A. LeFrancois & T. Macias (Eds), 2022
Population Control: Theorizing Institutional Violence , 2023
Voronka, J., Guta, A., Nguyen, T. (J.), Shaw, G. & Ahluwalia Cameron, A. (2023). Danger, safety, ... more Voronka, J., Guta, A., Nguyen, T. (J.), Shaw, G. & Ahluwalia Cameron, A. (2023). Danger, safety, and the rhetoric of urban crisis: Institutional logics and Windsor's downtown core. In J. Rinaldi & K. Rossiter (Eds.), Population Control: Theorizing Institutional Violence (pp.179-197). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Critical Public Health , 2023
Lori E. Ross, Merrick Pilling, Jijian Voronka, Kendra-Ann Pitta, Elizabeth McLeana, Carole King, ... more Lori E. Ross, Merrick Pilling, Jijian Voronka, Kendra-Ann Pitta, Elizabeth McLeana, Carole King, Yogendra Shakya, Kinnon R. MacKinnona, Charmaine C. Williams, Carol Strike and Adrian Guta.
Hiring peer researchers – individuals with lived experience of the phenom-enon under study – is an increasingly popular practice. However, little research has examined experiences of peer research from the perspectives of peer researchers themselves. In this paper, we report on data from a participatory, qualitative research project focused on four intersecting communities often engaged in peer research: mental health service user/ consumer/survivor; people who use drugs; racialized; and trans/non-binary communities. In total, 34 individuals who had worked as peer researchers participated in semi-structured interviews. Transcripts and interviewer reflections were analyzed using a participatory approach.
Many participants reported exposure to intersecting forms of systemic oppression (racism, transphobia, ableism, and classism, among others) and disparagement of their identities and lived experiences, both from other members of the research team and from the broader institutions in which they were work-ing. Peer researchers described being required to perform academic pro-fessionalism, while simultaneously representing communities that were explicitly or implicitly denigrated in the course of their work. Practices of resistance to these harms were evident throughout the interviews, and participants often made strategic decisions to permit themselves to be tokenized, out of the expectation of promised benefits to their communities. However, additional harms were often experienced when these benefits were not realized. These findings point towards the need for a more reflexive and critical approach to the use of peer research.
British Journal of Social Work, 2023
I think a warning I would give to peers, or people who are looking to become peer researchers, if... more I think a warning I would give to peers, or people who are looking to become peer researchers, if anything, is that the messaging around we want your lived experiences, it's useful, it'll help us in our research, it'll give us insight, and that's false messaging, because what people don't let you know is that the majority of the work is navigating bureaucracy, that's the work, not as much lived experiences. It's like, lived experiences in small pockets that are professional and digestible, and code switched enough and whatever. [But] It's actually navigating the bureaucracy, and that wasn't even said in this job. It isn't said in any of the peer research jobs I've done. . .
Caroline Yeo, Stefan Rennick-Egglestone, Yasmin Ali, Victoria Armstrong, Marit Borg, Simon Bradstreet, Alison Faulkner, Donna Franklin, Trude Klevan, Joy Llewellyn-Beardsley, Katy Mottram, Fiona Ng, Julie Repper, Mike Slade, Jijian Voronka, James Wooldridge., 2023
In memory of James Wooldridge, who lent his expertise to this document, and who has been a valued... more In memory of James Wooldridge, who lent his expertise to this document, and who has been a valued collaborator and friend of our work.
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies , 2019
This paper explores the politics of resilience and recovery narratives by bringing critical ethno... more This paper explores the politics of resilience and recovery narratives by bringing critical ethnography and auto-ethnographic methods to bear on my own experiences with storytelling distress in different contexts. Inviting people with lived experience to share their stories is now common practice in education, mental health, and broader community venues. Yet even when the intent of the stories shared are to offer systemic critique of mental health epistemes, it is difficult to hear such stories beyond the psychiatric gaze. I argue that individual storytelling practices now get processed through resiliency and recovery metanarratives that continue to position both the problem and its potential solution at the level of individual bodies. By offering an account of my own experiences of storytelling, I explore the limits, risks, and productive functions of this practice. This includes how such narratives, in accumulation, can reify conceptions of the resilient and recovered subject and thus help solidify mental health truth regimes.
PEERS research project , 2022
Things to consider when working alongside peer researchers
Social Work Education , 2021
Social work education increasingly prioritizes including service user
narratives as part of class... more Social work education increasingly prioritizes including service user
narratives as part of classroom curriculum. Lived experience has
also become valorized in health and social service sectors, where
service users are employed as peer workers to use their experiential
knowledge to inform, educate, and influence the sector. Drawing
on in-depth qualitative interviews, this paper allows peer workers to
reflect on their experiences of being invited to share their stories of
experiences of homelessness and/or mental health issues as part of
their work role. Peer workers note that sharing their stories is
complicated: it is often understood as an expectation of their
labour, there are contextual conditions that limit the ways that
they tell their stories and how narratives are interpreted through
larger metanarratives of mental illness and recovery. Participants
discuss social justice goals they have when sharing their stories, as
well as strategies they have developed to best achieve these goals.
Peers also consider the personal and political risks they undertake
when sharing their narratives in various contexts. These findings
contribute to the field by exploring how storytelling, often considered
a benign anti-oppressive practice in social work education, is
actually fraught with complications, considerations, and consequences
for those undertaking the storytelling.
Journal of Ethics in Mental Health , 2019
What new ethical quandaries are produced through the normalization of mental health service user ... more What new ethical quandaries are produced through the normalization of mental health service user inclusion as a best practice? The work collected in this special issue moves beyond justifying inclusion to trouble the ethics of these practices in and beyond mental health systems. Instead of presenting yet more guidelines, frameworks, and strategies for inclusive service delivery, community consultation, government advisories, and research, it offers critical examination of the ways in which patient engagement, peer workers, "lived experience," "experts by experience," and other similar identity driven prototypes are being harnessed. Service user inclusion, as it has been absorbed by mental health structures, has generated not only new institutional policies, texts, practices, and procedures-advisories, working groups, committees, "co-production" discourse-but also new public relations opportunities and new ways to promote the benevolence of these systems. This special issue attempts to interrupt this new business-as-usual of inclusionary practice. It steps back and asks-to what effect? From Mad Pride to Participation Pride In a broad range of mental health literatures, works on inclusion, diversity, and community engagement proliferate. Most champion inclusion, proposing that both mental health service users and practitioners benefit from it, and offer principles and best practices for how to include effectively. For service users, the supposed benefits of inclusion are usually positioned at the site of individual self-improvement, drawing on discourses of personal empowerment, resiliency, meaningful
Curriculum Inquiry, 2019
Medical discourse currently dominates as the defining framework for madness in educational praxis... more Medical discourse currently dominates as the defining framework for madness in educational praxis. Consequently, ideas rooted in a mental health/illness binary abound in higher learning, as both curriculum content and through institutional procedures that reinforce structures of normalcy. While madness, then, is included in university spaces, this inclusion proceeds in ways that continue to pathologize madness and disenfranchise mad people. This paper offers Mad Studies as an alternative entry point for engaging with madness in higher education, arguing that centring madness in pedagogical praxis has the potential to interrupt hegemonic ways of knowing, being, and learning. We illustrate how this disruption is facilitated by examining particular aspects of pedagogical praxis mobilized in Mad Studies, including building curriculum alongside mad community, centring madness in course design and student assessment, and the practice of mad positivity. Ultimately, this approach provides a metacurriculum of unlearning, challenging students to consider how their engagement with madness in the classroom, and beyond, has the potential to disrupt sanist systems of oppression and the normalcy they reconstitute.
Disability & Society, 2019
The inclusion imperative in community care means that disabled people are now increasingly being ... more The inclusion imperative in community care means that disabled people are now increasingly being employed as peer workers in the service systems that manage them. This article offers a timely inquiry into the role of the peer worker in mental health and homeless service sectors. Using ethnography and in-depth qualitative interviews
with fellow peer workers, I explore the paradoxical nature of new expectations for peer ‘authenticity,’ and the ways in which peer workers learn to manage the requirement to perform identity in our work roles. This analysis thus denaturalizes peer identity, and works to develop possibilities for doing disability identity-based work differently.
The concept of " community " is ubiquitous in mental health policy, research, and practice in Can... more The concept of " community " is ubiquitous in mental health policy, research, and practice in Canada; however, its meaning is rarely defined. In this paper, we consider the positioning of " community " within the Canadian historical and political mental health context and reveal that it contrasts with the lived experiences of people with psychiatric disabilities. We argue that mental health policy, research, and practice should move away from the term community in favour of a framework that addresses basic needs, disability justice, intersecting social identities, and the structural forces that impact the lives of people with psychiatric disabilities as they " recover " in settings outside of hospital. The authors would like to thank all of the participants in the research, as well as members of the research team and members of the Empowerment Council at CAMH for their invaluable assistance with the larger research project.
Studies in Social Justice, 2012
As advancements are made through processes of social inclusion, disability justice frameworks hav... more As advancements are made through processes of social inclusion, disability justice frameworks have emerged to query the limits of rights-based and incorporation strategies by revealing how such practices sustain systems of oppression. Indeed, disability justice has shown how inclusion models position “exclusion” as the problem in need of redress, leaving larger structural issues of inequity unchallenged. Positioned within the larger field of critical disability studies, mad studies scholars and activists are beginning to reevaluate the consequences of what it means to participate in regimes of power, as we now must deal with what results from being included and recognized by the political apparatuses and technologies that not only manage disability but also produce and sustain it. Here I show how the inclusion of peer support workers within dominant mental health service systems is an emerging form of affective labor, which can help orient service users toward feelings and emotions that actually cooperate with psy regimes of governance.
This paper offers a theoretical exploration on the value of harnessing ‘people with lived experie... more This paper offers a theoretical exploration on the value of harnessing ‘people with lived experience of mental health issues’ as an identity category to promote mental health social justice change. I engage longstanding feminist, postcolonial, and post-structural philosophical debates that have queried the possibilities, limits, and conditions of drawing on experience as expertise, and apply these debates to show what can happen when we rely on strategic essentialism under the rubric of ‘lived experience’ to authorize our power. By doing so, I attend to how essentialized notions of lived experience risk effacing the material, ontological and epistemological differences among us that matter, and what such universalism can produce when we engage in research and knowledge production as ‘people with lived experience.’
Social Work in Mental Health , 2014
This qualitative study explores narrative interviews of streetinvolved individuals with mental he... more This qualitative study explores narrative interviews of streetinvolved individuals with mental health issues and reflects on how they speak to experiences of both helpful and unhelpful social and mental health service provisions, and the disconnections between what they articulate as needing, and what services and supports they are able to receive. The article draws on and contributes to the field of peer research as the authors use lived experience of homelessness and/or mental health issues to inform both the approach to and analysis of the narratives. This study confirms that participants find the emerging, recovery-oriented structures Downloaded by [Ms Jijian Voronka] at 06:21 28 April 2014 250 J. Voronka et al.
Ben-Moshe, L., Chapman, C. & Carey, A.C (Eds.) (2014).Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and disability in the United States and Canada. NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Jihan Abbas & Jijian Voronka
Disability policy and the institutionalization and deinstitutionali... more Jihan Abbas & Jijian Voronka
Disability policy and the institutionalization and deinstitutionalization process provide the opportunity to critically reflect on social policy and praxis, with a specific emphasis on the construction of disability through projects of social and spatial exclusion. March 2009 saw the closure of the last of Ontario's remaining institutions for persons with intellectual disabilities, and the move from spatially confining mad people towards self-governance through community care are the current moments in Ontario's history of spatial incarceration.
Studies in Social Justice, 2012
Studies in Social Justice , 2012
This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overrelianc... more This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient "personal story." The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having "lived experience" has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore how personal stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from "agents of change" towards one of "disability tourism" or "patient porn." We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change.
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Articles by Jijian Voronka
Hiring peer researchers – individuals with lived experience of the phenom-enon under study – is an increasingly popular practice. However, little research has examined experiences of peer research from the perspectives of peer researchers themselves. In this paper, we report on data from a participatory, qualitative research project focused on four intersecting communities often engaged in peer research: mental health service user/ consumer/survivor; people who use drugs; racialized; and trans/non-binary communities. In total, 34 individuals who had worked as peer researchers participated in semi-structured interviews. Transcripts and interviewer reflections were analyzed using a participatory approach.
Many participants reported exposure to intersecting forms of systemic oppression (racism, transphobia, ableism, and classism, among others) and disparagement of their identities and lived experiences, both from other members of the research team and from the broader institutions in which they were work-ing. Peer researchers described being required to perform academic pro-fessionalism, while simultaneously representing communities that were explicitly or implicitly denigrated in the course of their work. Practices of resistance to these harms were evident throughout the interviews, and participants often made strategic decisions to permit themselves to be tokenized, out of the expectation of promised benefits to their communities. However, additional harms were often experienced when these benefits were not realized. These findings point towards the need for a more reflexive and critical approach to the use of peer research.
narratives as part of classroom curriculum. Lived experience has
also become valorized in health and social service sectors, where
service users are employed as peer workers to use their experiential
knowledge to inform, educate, and influence the sector. Drawing
on in-depth qualitative interviews, this paper allows peer workers to
reflect on their experiences of being invited to share their stories of
experiences of homelessness and/or mental health issues as part of
their work role. Peer workers note that sharing their stories is
complicated: it is often understood as an expectation of their
labour, there are contextual conditions that limit the ways that
they tell their stories and how narratives are interpreted through
larger metanarratives of mental illness and recovery. Participants
discuss social justice goals they have when sharing their stories, as
well as strategies they have developed to best achieve these goals.
Peers also consider the personal and political risks they undertake
when sharing their narratives in various contexts. These findings
contribute to the field by exploring how storytelling, often considered
a benign anti-oppressive practice in social work education, is
actually fraught with complications, considerations, and consequences
for those undertaking the storytelling.
with fellow peer workers, I explore the paradoxical nature of new expectations for peer ‘authenticity,’ and the ways in which peer workers learn to manage the requirement to perform identity in our work roles. This analysis thus denaturalizes peer identity, and works to develop possibilities for doing disability identity-based work differently.
Disability policy and the institutionalization and deinstitutionalization process provide the opportunity to critically reflect on social policy and praxis, with a specific emphasis on the construction of disability through projects of social and spatial exclusion. March 2009 saw the closure of the last of Ontario's remaining institutions for persons with intellectual disabilities, and the move from spatially confining mad people towards self-governance through community care are the current moments in Ontario's history of spatial incarceration.
Hiring peer researchers – individuals with lived experience of the phenom-enon under study – is an increasingly popular practice. However, little research has examined experiences of peer research from the perspectives of peer researchers themselves. In this paper, we report on data from a participatory, qualitative research project focused on four intersecting communities often engaged in peer research: mental health service user/ consumer/survivor; people who use drugs; racialized; and trans/non-binary communities. In total, 34 individuals who had worked as peer researchers participated in semi-structured interviews. Transcripts and interviewer reflections were analyzed using a participatory approach.
Many participants reported exposure to intersecting forms of systemic oppression (racism, transphobia, ableism, and classism, among others) and disparagement of their identities and lived experiences, both from other members of the research team and from the broader institutions in which they were work-ing. Peer researchers described being required to perform academic pro-fessionalism, while simultaneously representing communities that were explicitly or implicitly denigrated in the course of their work. Practices of resistance to these harms were evident throughout the interviews, and participants often made strategic decisions to permit themselves to be tokenized, out of the expectation of promised benefits to their communities. However, additional harms were often experienced when these benefits were not realized. These findings point towards the need for a more reflexive and critical approach to the use of peer research.
narratives as part of classroom curriculum. Lived experience has
also become valorized in health and social service sectors, where
service users are employed as peer workers to use their experiential
knowledge to inform, educate, and influence the sector. Drawing
on in-depth qualitative interviews, this paper allows peer workers to
reflect on their experiences of being invited to share their stories of
experiences of homelessness and/or mental health issues as part of
their work role. Peer workers note that sharing their stories is
complicated: it is often understood as an expectation of their
labour, there are contextual conditions that limit the ways that
they tell their stories and how narratives are interpreted through
larger metanarratives of mental illness and recovery. Participants
discuss social justice goals they have when sharing their stories, as
well as strategies they have developed to best achieve these goals.
Peers also consider the personal and political risks they undertake
when sharing their narratives in various contexts. These findings
contribute to the field by exploring how storytelling, often considered
a benign anti-oppressive practice in social work education, is
actually fraught with complications, considerations, and consequences
for those undertaking the storytelling.
with fellow peer workers, I explore the paradoxical nature of new expectations for peer ‘authenticity,’ and the ways in which peer workers learn to manage the requirement to perform identity in our work roles. This analysis thus denaturalizes peer identity, and works to develop possibilities for doing disability identity-based work differently.
Disability policy and the institutionalization and deinstitutionalization process provide the opportunity to critically reflect on social policy and praxis, with a specific emphasis on the construction of disability through projects of social and spatial exclusion. March 2009 saw the closure of the last of Ontario's remaining institutions for persons with intellectual disabilities, and the move from spatially confining mad people towards self-governance through community care are the current moments in Ontario's history of spatial incarceration.
This document describes key practices for community engagement in research on mental health or substance use. We address these two topics together in recognition that many academic researchers and research institutions are engaged
in research on both topics, while acknowledging that different (though sometimes overlapping) communities are concerned with these two
different issues. This document is intended to provide academic researchers with a foundation for conceptualizing how one or both of these communities might be engaged in their next research project in these areas.