In Sickness & In Health


	The self-styled “Helsinki 7” met together for the first time at the Ethos of Welfare conference organized by colleagues at the University of Helsinki in the year 2000. Although there are now more than seven people who comprise the Helsinki 7, the group name remains in recognition of its roots. All group members share an interest in the work of Michel Foucault and particularly in relation to the history of present-day health care. Our collective work explores problems encountered by people working within a range of health care fields as well as those people who enter the field of health care seeking care and respite. As such we follow Foucault’s writings on problematization, the set of discursive or nondiscursive practices that make something enter into the play of the true and false, constituting it as an object for thought – whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge or political analysis. Collectively, the Helsinki 7 has organized three international “In Sickness and in Health" conferences focusing on issues of ethics, power and practice. The first conference was held at the University of Melbourne in 2002. The conference re-convened at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik in 2004. Hosted by the University of Victoria, the third conference took place in April 2009 in Victoria on Canada’s beautiful west coast. The Helsinki 7
			Associate Professor & Dean, Faculty of Human & Social Development, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada Dr. Mary Ellen Purkis is the current Dean of the Faculty of Human and Social Development and an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing. She joined the School in 1993. She has focused her inquiries on critical and interpretive studies of health care delivery. In her research, she has focused on the impact of organizational efforts to introduce “patient focused care” on the relationship that ensues between care provider and care recipient. Dr. Purkis is working with colleagues from other Schools in the Faculty of Human & Social Development as a member of a New Emerging Team (NET funded by CIHR) where her focus is on understanding the conditions necessary to support high quality inter-professional team work within the context of palliative care. She has recently completed a study investigating practices of capacity building and health care continuity within the population of people diagnosed with cancer. The study raises important questions about the place of bio-medical science in the practice of medicine, nursing and other health disciplines, particularly the ways in which issues of quality of life are set aside in favour of scientific inquiry. Dr. Purkis has written extensively on topics such as how people’s experiences of life quality are impacted by organized systems of health care. Prior to this current study located in the context of cancer care, her areas of research have been focussed on in-patient surgical settings, the context of public health nursing, primary health care nurse-run centres and home nursing care. Dr. Purkis has extensive experience in graduate supervision. In total she has served on over 45 graduate committees as supervisor (11), committee member (28) or as external examiner (8).
			Professor, Faculty of Nursing, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland Kristen completed a BS degree in nursing at the University of Iceland in 1981, a masters degree from Columbia University in New York in 1986 and a doctoral degree from the same school in 1992. Her research has focused on the nature and development of nursing practice and the history of nursing. Currently, her main focus is in the area of home nursing care which is also the area of her teaching. Kristin's studies have received financial support both within the University of Iceland and from the Icelandic Science Foundation. Theoretically her approach is critical, post-structural and often informed by feminism.
			Assistant Professor, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Christine completed her PhD (Nursing) at the University of Calgary, Alberta in 2003, and then held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Victoria, BC from 2003-2005. Since 2006, Christine has been an assistant professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta. The work Christine undertakes is informed by a variety of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Chantal Mouffe, Annemarie Mol and Zygmunt Bauman whose work offers resources for thinking through how things are working, or not, in our present circumstances. Specific sites of study have included a case study of how knowledge and power work in institutional settings, a particular case illuminated by the Sinclair inquest report (released in 2000). This report examined the deaths of children in a Canadian pediatric cardiac surgery program in 1994 and though there was much of concern in this report, it was nurses’ experience of knowing but being unable to have their knowledge matter that was of interest to her. Still taking up questions of knowledge, power and organization, the current site of Christine's research is supportive home care for those who are older and frail. Questions concern the social, political and cultural interests that organize this site and work to establish what comes to be seen as the appropriate, acceptable parameters of home care. In this context, she is interested in understanding the conditions of possibility that structure home care practices, and our understanding and acceptance of these practices.
	Conference Committee:
			Post.doc, Health, Man & Society Research Unit, Univ of Southern Denmark and research nurse, Århus Univ Hospital, Risskov, Denmark Niels’ doctoral work (2005) was on culture and language use among mental health nurses and included a strong critique of the ways in which nurses build up knowledge about patients in their care. In his post.doc position, Niels is presently working on a study of depressed people’s experiences of taking psychotropic drugs in the wider context of their lives and recovery. The study is aimed at understanding why relatively many depressed persons stop taking the prescribed medication. In his position as research nurse, Niels is examining practices of clinical supervision in mental health setting. The aim of the study is to evaluate the impact of clinical supervision and to suggest ways of increasing both participation in and outcome of clinical supervision.Niels is specialized in qualitative methodology, but is engaged in discussions on the benefits and pitfalls of combining structured and non-structured approaches of collecting and interpreting data from health care settings.
			Associate Professor & Associate Dean, Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada My academic work is organized around four main domains, two well-established and two more recent, all of which aim at politicizing health practices and knowledge production from an international perspective. These four areas are: (i) Gender, migration, and other social determinants of health; (ii) Power relations in health promotion, nursing, and health care; (iii) Nursing and international health theoretical development; (iv) Qualitative methodology. Most of my research is supported by poststructuralist and critical social theories. In terms of methodology, I tend to favour qualitative and participatory-action approaches (some recent projects are listed below). My publications are written in English, Spanish or Portuguese. My current educational projects include introducing global health as a core component of undergraduate and graduate nursing oration (INPhD) which involves curriculum, participating of the Essentials of Qualitative Research Series, an integrated series of Master and PhD courses for students from all health sciences disciplines, doing international capacity building for health research, and coordinating the International Nursing PhD Collabnursing faculties from Canada, Spain, Mexico and Australia.
			Professor & Nurse-Researcher, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada Dr. Dave Holmes is Full Professor at the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Nursing and Nurse-Researcher at the University of Ottawa, Institute of Mental Health Research (Forensic Psychiatry Program). After completing his BSc (Ottawa, 1991), MSc (Montreal, 1998) and PhD (Montreal/McGill, 2002) in Nursing, Dr Holmes completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Health Care, Technology and Place - CIHR Strategic Interdisciplinary Research Training Program at the University of Toronto (2003). To date, Dr Holmes received funding, as principal investigator, from CIHR and SSHRC, to conduct his research program (risk management) in the fields of Public Health and Forensic Nursing. Most of his work, comments, essays, analyses and research are based on the poststructuralist works of Deleuze & Guattari and Michel Foucault. His works have been published in top-tier journals in nursing, criminology, sociology and medicine. Dr Holmes has published over 75 articles in peer reviewed journals, 8 book chapters and has presented to numerous conferences both internationally and nationally. He was appointed as Honorary Visiting Professor in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
			Professor & Dean, Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Sioban Nelson is an internationally known researcher whose scholarship spans history, ethics and policy research. As dean of the Faculty of Nursing, Dr Nelson brings together her wide experience in policy development and professional leadership with her commitment to excellence in nursing practice and education. Her current areas of research include: the history of the Rockefeller Foundation; the study of team communication in a simulated environment; violence in the clinical context; competency assessment and regulation.
			Professor of Sociology & Head of the Department of Applied Psychosocial Sciences, City University, London, United Kingdom Anthony Pryce is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of Applied Psychosocial Sciences, City University, London and has been involved in the development of the ISIH Conference series since the original meeting in Helsinki. His primary teaching and research interests engage with constructions of health and illness, and most particularly with discourses around sexualities and health. He has a long history of using qualitative and historical research methods, including the Internet and is currently working on the largest survey undertaken in Germany on sexual attitudes, practices and values. The use of visual imagery and other media have been a consistent interest in his work and include collaboration with The Tate Modern, London. Other current and planned projects continue the work around excluded or marginalised populations and sexual identity.
			Professor, Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Trudy is a registered general and mental health nurse. She completed her general training at Christchurch Public Hospital, New Zealand and her psychiatric training at North Ryde Psychiatric Hospital in the early 70s. She has worked in community mental health, plastic surgery units, and burns care which crosses over these two areas of interest and in occupational health and safety in various locations in NSW and SA. She completed a BA(Hons) in Anthropology in 1982 (University of Adelaide), and was awarded her Doctor of Philosophy in nursing in 1998 from LaTrobe University, Melbourne. Trudy’s main academic interests are in the related areas of sociology of the body and technologies of care as these relate to nursing practices and knowledge development. Her PhD explored the interactions between nurses and patients during wound care procedures in a burns unit and developed a way of exploring such nursing practices using the work of Michel Foucault, Nikolas Rose and theorists of social space such as Henri Lefebvre. Trudy is working on innovative ways to facilitate a focus on primary health care and the social determinants of health in nursing education, as well as ways for nurse education to include interaction with other groups of health professionals during their educational experience. Her interest in technologies in nursing and social space led to research on the use of pharmaceuticals in schizophrenia (with Kristy Morse), and now to work on the social space of waiting in cancer treatment. At present she is writing on the ethics of care in trauma nursing; emotional defenses and their effects on nursing and health care; governing of nursing research through its domestication as “emancipatory professional development”; and the critique of managerialism as this is used to ‘manage’ nurses and the health care system.