DWED 2024 Speaker: Stephanie Nixon, PhD

Stephanie Nixon, PhD, is Vice-Dean (Faculty of Health Sciences) and Director (School of Rehabilitation Therapy) at Queen’s University. Prior to joining Queen’s in 2022, Stephanie was a professor in the Department of Physical Therapy and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto for 15 years.  She completed her PhD in Public Health and Bioethics in 2006 at the University of Toronto, and a post-doc at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa in 2007. Stephanie was director of the International Centre for Disability and Rehabilitation from 2012-2021. Stephanie is a straight, white, middle class, able-bodied, cisgender, settler woman who tries to understand the pervasive effects of privilege. She explores how systems of oppression shape health care, research and education, and the role of people in positions of unearned advantage in disrupting these harmful patterns. Stephanie developed the Coin Model of Privilege and Critical Allyship as a way to translate core ideas about anti-oppression to people in positions of unearned advantage.