Dr Janki Shankar

Biography

Janki Shankar is a full Professor in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Calgary. She joined academia after 17 years of clinical experience as a social worker and therapist, primarily in mental health and specialized vocational rehabilitation settings for people with severe disability in Sydney, Australia.  She has also worked in West Africa and India.   Dr. Shankar’s research focuses on the challenges to integration and well-being arising from stigma, discrimination, and racism experienced by immigrant workers and families, immigrant students, and people with disabilities arising from mental illness and brain injury.  Her current research is on occupational safety, health, and well-being of immigrant and Canadian-born workers in precarious employment settings and prevention of family violence and Children’s services intervention in immigrant families. Dr. Shankar has received several research awards as a principal investigator and has been a coinvestigator/collaborator in many research projects. Her research has been funded by tri-council grants, namely Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), and other major funding bodies like Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Policy Wise, Alberta Health, and Department of Labor, Government of Alberta. Dr. Shankar is one of the few social work academics in Canada to receive tri-council funding for leading the research on occupational safety and well-being of new Canadians.    

Dr. Shankar’s scholarship includes over a hundred refereed journal publications and presentations at National and International conferences. She has been invited by universities in Australia and India to talk about her research and to serve on the examination committees of higher degree national and international students.  At a National level, she reviews research grant applications for major funders like SSHRC, Policy Wise (Alberta), and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR, British Columbia). As an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta since 2010,  she has collaborated on research projects in the areas of aging and mental health, workplace health, family caregiving, supported employment and education,  taught in their mental health and addictions program, has provided research mentorship to junior professors on tenure track and been on the supervisory and examination committees of their doctoral students.  Besides research, Dr. Shankar has extensive teaching and higher degree student supervision experience. She teaches a wide range of courses in Diversity, Oppression and Social Justice, Cross-Cultural Violence, Advanced Practice in Mental Health, Research, and Critical Social Policy.  Her teaching philosophy and practices are strongly influenced by decolonizing pedagogies and post-colonial theories