Isabel Dyck is a social and feminist geographer and a member of the Health, Place and Society research theme. She taught at the University of British Columbia, Canada, from 1988 until 2005, joining Queen Mary’s Department of Geography in 2005. Her work has contributed to the development of feminist and health geography, initially through early research on mothering, and then through several years of work on various issues related to women, illness, disability and health care. She has extensive experience of qualitative research, and has written a number of methodology articles. Her leadership of the Social Domain of the RIIM, the Vancouver Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, was important in the development of more recent, ongoing collaborative research with immigrant and refugee households in Canada. See below for further information.

Research:
Isabel’s research centres on issues of gender, body, and identity in analysing the constitution of everyday life within wider processes of social, economic and political change. Particular areas of research include:

• Gendered experiences of immigration and settlement, including work and health
• The organisation of care and caring practices
• Food practices, food consumption, body and identity
• Body, identity and women with chronic illness

Research with chronically ill and disabled women has focused on their employment, their restructuring of home and work environments, and their negotiation of a disabled identity. Other work with chronically ill women has explored immigrant women’s management of illness and issues related to their health care access. This work concerning women’s health, space, body and identity is reflected in the books: Dyck, I., Lewis, N.D., & McLafferty, S. (eds) (2001) Geographies of Women’s Health, London, Routledge and Moss, P. & Dyck, I. (2002) Women, Body, Illness: Space and Identity in the Everyday Lives of Women with Chronic Illness, Rowman and Littlefield

The home is a central theme in her research. As part of a Canadian interdisciplinary project on the home as a site of long term care, she has examined the micro-practices of home care and care giving relationships following health care restructuring. The home and family are also of interest in her research with the Metropolis Project, an international collaborative initiative on immigration and integration. Gender and generational differences in experiences of immigration and integration provide a particular focus. Specific projects concern mothers’ and daughters’ renegotiation of identity and meanings of family and home; comparison of issues for immigrants and refugees settling in different neighbourhoods; and the management of health and illness in home and community spaces.

New research beginning in East London, Household diversity, food and the construction of ‘healthy space’ in East London, is examining how members of households inserted differently in East London’s Borough of Newham construct home and neighbourhood as healthy space. Conceptually the research is located at the interface of social geography and the therapeutic landscape tradition in health geography, which together indicate differentials in the experience of place and consider the active role of human agents in constructing healthy space in its material, social and symbolic dimensions. The study builds on previous research in Canada on the re-constitution of home and family through processes of immigration and resettlement, which indicated the significance of food as a site of negotiation in the context of isues of cultural and national belonging. Food practices again provide a point of entry into the complex links among place, households, and the construction of discourses of ‘belonging’.

Isabel is convening a two part session at the 2006 RSG-IBG Annual Conference: Places, Bodies, Health: Landscapes of Knowledge and Power, Wednesday, August 30th.

Some recent selected publications:

• Dyck, I. (2006) Travelling tales and migratory meanings: South Asian migrant women talk of place, health and healing. Social & Cultural Geography, 7(1): 1-18.
• Dyck, I. (2005) Feminist geography, the ‘everyday’, and local-global relations: hidden spaces of place-making. The Canadian Geographer, 49(3): 233-243
• Dyck, I., Kontos, P, Angus, J., and McKeever, P. (2005) The home as a site for long term care: Meanings and management of bodies and spaces, Health and Place, 11(2): 173-185.
• Angus, J., Kontos, P., Dyck, I., McKeever, P. & Poland, B. (2005) The personal significance of home: Habitus and the experience of receiving long term home care, Sociology of Health and Illness, 27(2): 161-187.
• Kearns, R.A. & Dyck, I. (2005) Culturally safe research. In: Dianne Wepa (ed) Cultural Safety in Aotearoa New Zealand, Pearson Education (NZ), pp.79-88
• Dyck, I & McLaren, A. (2004) Telling it like it is … Gender, place and multiculturalism in immigrant women’s settlement narratives Gender, Place and Culture, 11(4):513-534.
• McLaren, A.T. & Dyck, I. (2004) Mothering, human capital and the “ideal immigrant, Women’s Studies International Forum, 27 (1): 41-53.
• Dyck, I. (2004) Immigration, place and health: South Asian women’s accounts of health, illness and everyday life, RIIM Working Papers, (04-05) Vancouver.
• Moss, P & Dyck, I. (2003) Embodying social geography In K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile & N. Thrift (eds) Handbook of Cultural Geography. Sage Publications
• Dyck, I. (2003) Feminism and Health Geography: twin tracks or divergent agendas? Gender, Place and Culture, 10(4), 361-368.
• Dyck, I & O’Brien, P. (2003) Thinking about environment: Introducing geographies of disability to rehabilitation Canadian Geographer, 47(4), 400-413.
• Moss, P. & Dyck, I. (2002) Women, Body, Illness: Space and Identity in the Everyday Lives of Women with Chronic Illness. Lanham, Maryland , Rowman and Littlefield.

Click here to go to Isabel Dyck’s main page covering all her work in the Department of Geography