Power, Discourse and Resistance in Mental Health Care

I am Professor and University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa, School of Nursing (Ottawa, Canada) and also Researcher at Institut national de psychiatrie légale Philippe-Pinel (Montréal, Canada). After completing my B.Sc. (Ottawa, 1991), M.Sc. (Montreal, 1998) and Ph.D. (Montreal, 2002) in Nursing, I have completed a CIHR post-doctoral fellowship in Health Care, Technology and Place at the University of Toronto (2003). To date, I have received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to conduct my research program on risk management in the fields of public health and forensic nursing. Most of my works, comments, essays, analyses and empirical research are based on the poststructuralist works of Deleuze & Guattari and Michel Foucault. My works have been published in top-tier journals in nursing, criminology, sociology and medicine. To this day, I have published over 160 articles in peer reviewed journals and 50 book chapters. I am co-editor of Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Health Care (Routledge – April 2009), Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Care (Routledge – January 2010), (Re)Thinking Violence in Health Care Settings: A Critical Approach (Routledge – December 2011), Power and the Psychiatric Apparatus (Routledge – March 2014) and, Radical Sex Between Men: Assembling Desiring-Machines (Routledge – September 2017). I have presented at numerous national and international conferences and was appointed as Honorary Visiting Professor in Australia, Indonesia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Amélie Perron is an Associate professor at the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa. Besides her doctoral research on psychiatric nursing care in a correctional setting, she has worked on many research projects in the fields of psychiatry and forensic psychiatry in Canada, France and Australia. She received financial support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for her doctoral work.

Her fields of interest include nursing care provided to captive and marginalized populations, psychiatric nursing, forensic psychiatry, power relationships between health care professionals and patients, as well as issues of discourse, risk, gender and ethics. She also writes on issues relating to the sociopolitical aspects of nursing education, knowledge and epistemology. Her clinical practice is grounded in community psychiatry and crisis intervention. She has published many articles in peer-reviewed journals and is the Receiving Editor for  Aporia .