Assistant Professor

School of Social Work
St. John's College
Room: J-3021
Memorial University of Newfoundland

Phone: 709-864-8583
Email: jjanes@mun.ca

Dr. Julia Elizabeth Janes is a first generation scholar, second generation settler to Newfoundland, and a guest on the ancestral homelands of the Mi'kmaq and Beothuk. Julia received her PhD from York University, and a MSW and BA in English Literature/Economics from the University of Toronto.

Julia’s professional experience includes community practice to promote the well-being and inclusion of marginalized older adults, and clinical practice in crisis intervention, social enterprise, psychiatric patient advocacy, and health promotion among refugees. Her activist work contests the violence’s of neoliberal late capitalism, contemporary colonialism, white supremacy and racism, psychiatric systems, and housing/income insecurity.

Julia’s research interests are driven by the communities that she has collaborated with on numerous participatory action research projects and, therefore, engage with multiple sites of social isolation, exclusion and displacement. The limits of these collaborations inspired her SSHRC funded doctoral research, which inquired into the uneven social relations, negotiations of power, everyday practices and outcomes of community/university research alliances. She has also collaborated on two projects, led by Dr. Anucha from York University, focused on mobilizing positive youth development in racialized communities: “Assets Coming Together for Youth” and “New Opportunities for Innovative Student Engagement.” Julia is currently working with Dr. McDonald of the University of Toronto and Dr. Timoshkina of Lakehead University on a SSHRC funded study on the trafficking of older persons. After a yearlong program in decolonizing post-secondary education, Julia is seeking research and practice alliances that disrupt settler colonialism and support indigenous resurgence.

Julia’s teaching and supervision interests include community-based participatory research; arts-informed, collaborative approaches to social work; critical gerontology; critical race, whiteness, post structural and anti-colonial theories; decolonizing epistemologies and methodologies; intersections between environmental and social justice; ableism/sanism; harm reduction; and community practice. Julia is a methods enthusiast who deploys quantitative and qualitative approaches, as distinct ways of knowing that can be carefully and collectively leveraged for social change.

Further information about Dr. Janes’ academic and professional work can be found here.