GOLD Speakers

Sherrill Conroy, PhD

• Country: Canada

Biography:

Dr. Conroy has worked with youth in various regions of Canada during her lifetime where she has lived and worked. She has a strong belief in their ability not only to envision a more hopeful future, but also to dream and make those dreams possible. She brought to fruition the S. Lake Cree First Nations project that brought youth together to photograph, draw pictures, and create putty sculptures about community people, subjects, objects, or events which made them happy or sad about living in their community. These projects were the model upon which subsequent research proposals are founded. It was with great pride and delight that she and the research team enabled the S. Lake youth – some of whom were gang members previously, skilled in producing graffiti that defaced S. Lake territory– to initiate and complete a wall mural in the local high school depicting social determinants of wellness in S. Lake.  Before, during this project, and afterwards, Dr. Conroy has continued to build network connections with Albertan Indigenous people attracting very interested people to this project. She brought a research team together some of whom joined into a large SSHRC project. Her work as a paediatric nurse enabled her to understand the power of art forms for children and youth as a means of expressing their innermost feelings and values.  She appreciates the value of various art forms and is a visual artist in her own right. Her doctoral work involved developing a method for interpretive phenomenology (IP) which was used by Drs. Cynthia Murray, Glenda Carson, and Hamilton Wilson. She successfully twinned IP and CB-PAR research methods and continues to supervise doctoral, masters, and undergraduate students.