Karen Flynn

The Colour of Birth project is significant as it provides us and opportunity to unearth and tell alternative narratives of Canadian midwifery history. A disproportionate number of the nurses I interviewed for my book, Moving Beyond Borders (external link) : A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora (external link)  were trained midwives of colour who were unable to practice in Canada. By attending to the racialized histories of nurses of colour, we tell a much broader history of health care and medicine that will enhance our collective knowledge.

BIO

PhD, M.A.

Karen Flynn is an Associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Department of African-American Studies (external link) , and the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University, Toronto, Ontario, in 2003. Her research interests include migration and travel, Black Canada, health, popular culture, feminist, Diasporic and post-colonial studies. Dr. Flynn’s book: Moving Beyond Borders (external link) : Black Canadian and Caribbean women in the African Canadian Diaspora published by University of Toronto won the Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association of the History of Nursing. She is currently working on a second book project that maps the travel itineraries of young Black EFL teachers across borders.  

In her leadership role on the project, Dr. Flynn’s expertise is to employ Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithms and comparative text mining (CTM) to identify types of conversations that emerge about Black women's shared experience over time and the resulting knowledge that speaks to reproductive justice holding the potential to affect change at the level of community and health policy.  She is excited to be working on the team and to revisit the lives of Black immigrants who hold experiences of both nursing and midwifery practice.

In addition to her academic work, Dr. Flynn has published numerous editorials in Share, Canada’s largest ethnic newspaper, which serves the Black & Caribbean communities in the Greater Metropolitan Toronto area. area. Dr. Flynn has had oped articles (external link)  in Now Magazine, the Toronto Star, and Rabble.ca. She was also a free-lance writer for Canada Extra, and most recently for Swaymag.ca where she wrote passionately about contemporary issues considering issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and nation. Dr. Flynn was recently a Dean’s Fellow for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS), a program geared towards strengthening and expanding the cadre of leaders in the College. In 2015, Dr. Flynn was selected as the Conrad Humanities Fellow for LAS for excellence in scholarship.