The HEAL Lab

🎊🎉👏 Congratulations Shamara on her paper published today in Feminism and Psychology on Black women’s interest in physical activity! This study integrates a Black intersectional feminist lens to explore how Black Canadian women understand their interest in and engagement with physical activity spaces, highlighting how sociocultural context, representation, and community shape both motivation and experience. Findings show that while strengths-based, community-centered approaches can support engagement, barriers such as exclusion, inaccessibility, and sociocultural norms continue to limit participation, which underscores the need for culturally affirming and inclusive fitness spaces.

To read her paper and learn more, please click on: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09593535261442923 (it’s open access/free) :)

‼️🚨 Thank you to all of you who shared your story with us of medical gaslighting, dismissal and invalidation in the Canadian healthcare system. We had a huge response to our survey, with over 1500 participants writing, and reflecting on their personal story and journey for acute and chronic health issues. In some cases, a 2000 character limit on qualtrics wasn’t enough, and many wrote about multiple experiences and incidents. It has taken our team time to code and work through the data, which we hope to publish soon. But, for now, we are able to share a preliminary poster of our main findings, and themes. We will have even more information to share soon, but we are so grateful for YOU, and YOUR willingness to open up with us about these challenging times in your lives, and to offer guidance on what idealized care would look like moving forward. Leaving a better future for the next generation of folks navigating health care was a major reason for participating. is taking this study to the next step by conducting follow-up interviews, based on lessons learned from this survey, co-designed with participants as partners throughout. Stay tuned! 🚨‼️. Thank you to our team .v and Dr Kichler for engaging with this work l, and to our participants for sharing. We are acting on these findings -our next steps have involved a lot of conversations with folks and organizations and communities across Canada 🇨🇦. We are organizing! Please always feel free to reach out and connect in any way you’d like. ♥️

Amazing work .v and on their poster presentations at the conference! Niksha presented a review of fem tech and Jennifer presented a qualitative analysis of earliest memories of PCOS! Way to go!! Excellent job to these two presenters and their teams :).

Congratulations for being recognized as an emerging feminist scholar by ! 🎉🥳. Hio Tong does such incredible work at the nexus of s*xual empowerment, neoliberal ideologies and gender-based violence using multiple methods and theoretical frameworks that amplify lived experiences. She’s nearing the end of her PhD degree but has made such a mark on this field of study and . ♥️.