In this essay, Patricia Van Katwyk and Veen Wong examine the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on personal support workers in Ontario, Canada. The authors share findings from their SSRC-supported research, which leveraged photovoice—a form of community-based storytelling using images—to facilitate the sharing of experiences characterized by precarity and grief.
Trish Van Katwyk
Trish Van Katwyk is an associate professor in the School of Social Work at University of Waterloo. A major focus of her work is exploring the ways in which community immersion and artistic expression can activate healthy communities and many important ways of knowing. She likes to support and participate in collaborations that can critique structures that can hold us back and create obstacles to positive, holistic, and collective health. In other words, Van Katwyk likes to work with others to make change in the name of social justice. She has used dance, sculpture, painting, comic book and poster creation, digital stories, and photovoice. And she has engaged in collaborative art creation and in land-based journey in order to extend an understanding of holistic knowing so that meaningful relationships are built. Van Katwyk is now learning about how performance and theatre can also be used to create change and promote health.