Today’s Youth and Mental Health Hope, Power, and Resilience

Soheila Pashang , MSW, PhD is a Professor and Academic Coordinator in the Department of Health and Sciences, Social Service Worker – Immigrants and Refugees Program at Seneca College. She has over two decades of professional work as a social worker within interdisciplinary fields in Toronto. Her area of professional practice and academic work is informed by gender, equity, and social justice grounded in anti-racism and colonialism and anti-oppression perspectives. By relying on arts informed strategies, professor Pashang focuses on the issues of forced displacement, illegalized migration, Canadian immigration system, human service organizations, gender violence, trauma and mental health. She is a recipient of a number of awards for her contributions towards the front-line work, advocacy, and academic achievement, and has published poetry, books, and chapters.

Nazilla Khanlou , RN, PhD is the Women's Health Research Chair in Mental Health in the Faculty of Health atYork University and an Associate Professor in its School of Nursing. Professor Khanlou's clinical background is in psychiatric nursing. Her overall program of research is situated in the interdisciplinary field of community-based mental health promotion in general, and mental health promotion among youth and women in multicultural and immigrant-receiving settings in particular. She has received grants from peer-reviewed federal and provincial research funding agencies. She is founder of the International Network on Youth Integration (INYI), an international network for knowledge exchange and collaboration on youth. She has published articles, chapters, and books on youth, women, and mental health.

Jennifer Clarke , MSW, RSW, PhD (c) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Ryerson University. Her teaching, research and practice are grounded in anti-oppression, critical race, and anti-Black racism perspectives in the areas of social work education; childwelfare; and K-12 public education.  Her overall program of research explores the intersections of race, child welfare and education, with a focus on surveillance, racial profiling, criminalization, and the pathways of confinement via zero tolerance school safety-to-prison pipeline; grief and trauma among Black families who lose children; social issues in the Caribbean; and critical policy analysis. She is the recipient of multiple research grants and awards, has published several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and currently a guest editor for the Journal of Critical Anti-Oppressive Social Inquiry (CAOS).