Faculty & Research

Women Living with Homelessness: They are (almost) invisible

In her presentation  at the Women’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Speakers Series  on April 24th  sponsored by the Echo Chair in Women’s Mental Health Research, Associate Professor of Nursing Isolde Daiski spoke about “Women Living with Homelessness: They are (almost) invisible”.

Daiski was a hospital nurse for many years, before she earned her Masters and Doctorate degrees and began teaching in the School of Nursing at Ryerson University in 1990. Since 2001 she has been a full-time faculty member at the School of Nursing at York University. Isolde Isolde-Daiski-pic (1) also volunteers as a nurse with an outreach program operated by the Sherbourne Health Centre which  delivers mobile on-the-spot nursing care to homeless and underhoused individuals in Sherbourne’s southeast Toronto area as well as other parts of the city, called the ‘Health Bus’.

Isolde Daiski

Daiski delved into narratives from three homeless women of different ages in order to bring to light the difficulties of being a homeless woman in Canada. Her methodology involved running their experiences through Foucault and Kearney’s theories on power relations, “othering”, and neo-liberalism. Daiski also used narrative hermeneutics in her research and lecture – essentially, understanding another person through his/her narrative/story – and how we can better understand marginalized populations by listening to their stories.

The first story was about a 13-year-old girl who chose to “be free” on the streets after her father’s death and her mother’s ensuing alcoholism. Her story, full of sexual abuse, abuse by authorities, and a cold reception from the public, was indicative of the problems nurses and social workers see every day on the streets and in Canada’s shelters.

Daiski recounted the young woman’s story about sexual assault after being invited into someone’s home, when the young woman said, “You go through what you go through. It’s worse on the street.” Still, she says, “I prefer physical abuse, because verbal and emotional take longer to heal.”

All three women’s narratives overlapped in the conditions that resulted in their homelessness: suffering abuse at home; experiencing the jolt of intense poverty due to health issues or the loss of a job; and experiencing a severe lack of a social safety net. Daiski said that services that require documentation are almost impossible to acquire for the homeless because of the lack of an address; shelters quickly run out of beds; and support houses for women are sometimes located in remote areas where access to other services is a challenge. Many women end up on the street because of reasons outside of their control, yet society blames them anyway.

Read More »

New book explores origins of social brain

TheInfantMindBkYork psychology Professor Maria Legerstee, along with two colleagues, has co-edited a newly published book that sheds light on the social brain of the infant.

The Infant Mind: Origins of the Social Brain (Guilford Press) features 14 world-renowned contributors who explore the transactions among genes, the brain and the environment in the earliest years of life. It integrates cutting-edge research from multiple disciplines, and provides a dynamic and holistic picture of the developing infant mind.

In addition to Legerstee, The Infant Mind is edited by University of Toronto Professor David Haley and Marc Bornstein, senior investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda Maryland.

The contributors probe the neural correlates of core sensory, perceptual, cognitive, emotional and social capacities. They highlight the importance of early relationships, presenting compelling findings on how parent-infant interactions influence neural processing and brain maturation. Innovative research methods are discussed, MariaLegersteeincluding applications of behavioral, hormonal, genetic and brain imaging technologies.

Maria Legerstee

Legerstee says this particular book was partly inspired by a critique she received after publishing, Infants Sense of People: Precursors to a Theory of Mind (Cambridge Press, 2005), which was an account of her own research. It provided detailed descriptions of the infants’ developing behavioral repertoire during the first year of life, attesting to the fact that infants demonstrated an awareness of the mind of others with their meaningful gazing at their parents’ faces, to exchanging emotions with them, to redirecting their parents’ attention to an object of their own interest.

In Infants Sense of People, Legerstee argues that these behavioral responses showed that infants were born with a social brain that gave them a leg up in connecting with the social world rather than a tabula rasa (blank slate) that initially only allowed infants to know the world behaviorally, rather than psychologically. “I proposed that the development of infants awareness of the mind, developed continuously rather than from perception to conception.”

Legerstee said the book did well. Soon after publication the book ranked seventh on best sellers in psychology, as compiled by YBP Library Services, and was subsequently translated into Italian and Japanese. Critics of her theoretical orientation, however, argued that as much as one would like to know what is in the minds of babies, the fact remains that infants, in the first few months of life, have only a small number of ways to tell us what they are thinking, she says.

Read More »