Kathryn Edmunds
Kathryn Edmunds, PhD, RN, was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Windsor, retiring in June 2020 after a variety of experiences in the academy. While practicing as a public health nurse with the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit in the 1990’s, I became adjunct faculty and a sessional instructor. From 2003-2006 I held a limited-term position, and after receiving my PhD in 2016, returned full-time to the university. Throughout my career I have collaborated in many multi-agency community health initiatives. My teaching and research interests include using a critical theoretical perspective to explore relationships among displacement, gendered migration, structural violence, and health experienced by temporary agricultural workers in Canada, and how the concepts of culture, power and cultural safety are utilized (or not) in nursing and healthcare.
I believe students do and should learn much more than course content from their professors. They learn how we strive to be knowledgeable, competent, open to our own learning, and humble. However, the experience of being a faculty member or student in the academy can be fraught with uncertainties and self-doubt. I have become more sensitive to the difficulties of struggling with known and sometimes unknown challenges, and of making visible barriers that may not be well-understood by others. As a former student, faculty member and Employment Equity Procedures Assessor, I strongly endorse the University of Windsor commitment to flexibility and support for those students and faculty whose paths to and within post-secondary education may be more difficult and diverse.