Dr. Roz Zulla

This SSHRC-funded project explores the service delivery experiences between immigrant and refugee families with neurodivergent children and different service providers who work at the intersection of settlement and disability (e.g., cultural health broker, youth worker, disability educator, speech language pathologist and pastor). Specific goals of this project is to explore the individual, relational, organizational and systemic influences that shape how families and service providers work together and make decisions to support the needs of a neurodivergent child. 

There is a growth of partnerships in research involving immigrant and refugee families with neurodivergent children and organizations supporting them.  However, guidance is rarely given to researchers on how to build research relationships with communities who often have intersecting identities (e.g., speakers of minoritized languages, those who are racialized and who are neurodivergent).  In this Child Bright Network-funded project, a written and video guide is created for researchers to provide guidance on how to build meaningful research relationships with a variety of stakeholders. The guide focuses on relationship-building in key research phases, present and reflect on examples of meaningful research processes and products employed by our community-university partnership. 

This City of Edmonton-funded study seeks to explore the experiences of navigating public spaces from the perspectives of immigrant and refugee families with neurodivergent children and service providers who support them.  Key areas explored in this study include the meaning of space, considerations to access and use spaces and recommendations to help public spaces be more welcoming and safe for immigrant and refugee families with neurodivergent children. 

Through a collaborative approach (Co-PI: Krista Osborne), this Edmonton-based project works with 2SLGBTQIA+individuals with intersectional identities to co-create positive visibility, promote inclusion and foster dialogues about creating safe spaces that attend to the whole person and not specific identities. Through film, this project illuminate strength-based queer intersectionality narratives, highlighting how 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals with intersectional identities who leverage their own and their community’s assets fosters dialogue on how to create safe spaces by leveraging existing and emergent assets within individual-community relationships. An evaluation of this project will reveal how film and panel discussions can be used as tools to break grand narratives embedded in 2SLGBTQIA+ public and practice discourses.
 

Encountering weight bias has often been a common experience when seeking help from skilled professionals. Unfortunately, training opportunities to support healthcare professionals often had immediate and not long-lasting effects: warranting a need to explore new ways to better understand how to create new educational interventions. Both intersectionality and transformative learning are promising approaches to address and reduce weight bias as both have a potential to promote critical and deep learning via a critical interactionist approach. In this community-based study, a body-mapping workshop will be developed as a tool to enhance awareness among student health professionals (e.g., social workers and medical students) about weight bias.  An evaluation will illuminate how critical educational tools can deepen students' learning experiences, particularly how they make embodied shifts in sense-making as they navigate hypothetical weight conversations with patients in clinical settings

This community-based participatory research project works with community organizations to explore the experiences, needs, assets and future hopes of Black immigrant and refugee youth and young adults who have a neurodevelopmental disability. Emergent learnings are expected to inform service providers on how they can leverage assets (individual, family, organizations and community) and thus better support Black immigrant and refugee families who have a youth or a young adult with a neurodevelopmental disability.