Jan DeFehr, MSW, Ph.D.
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Phone: 204-960-3048
Email: jn.defehr@uwinnipeg.ca
Jan DeFehr lives and works on Treaty One Land as an associate professor in the faculty of education at the University of Winnipeg. A strong supporter of anti-oppressive, peer-led, care-based communities, Jan has worked as a publicly funded social worker/counsellor for twenty years in settings ranging from “youth corrections,” community health center programs, hospital, and university student counselling services. She became an associate of the Taos Institute in 2008 and has regularly written and presented with colleagues at the Kanankil Institute (Mérida, México) since 2004. She joined co-authors Cynthia Loreto Sosa Infante and Christian Israel Lizama Valladares to write Dialogic Social Inquiry: Qualitative Research Without a Methodological Map (2021).
Jan’s teaching and research forge generative connections between professional ethics standards, anticolonial liberation movements, and critical scholarship in the field of mental health. Promoting informed choice rather than implied consent practices and policies, her work aims to build public access to the extensive body of peer-reviewed critical mental health scholarship that is omitted from mental health promotion campaigns and curricula. Jan holds an MSW from the University of Manitoba and PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences from Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
Additional selected publications:
DeFehr, J. N. (2023). In H. Anderson & D. Gehart (Eds.), From mechanized systems to living
ecologies: Way-finding in collaborative-dialogic research. Collaborative-dialogic practices across
contexts, cultures, and disciplines (pp. 201-223). Routledge.
DeFehr, J. N. (2022). Going Public: A clinic’s call for full disclosure of critical mental health
knowledge. In J. N. Lester & M. O’Reilly (Eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Critical Perspectives
in Mental Health (pp. 1-17). Palgrave Macmillan
DeFehr, J. N. (2020). Mental disorder diagnosis as colonial place-naming: Contesting the practices of
implied consent. In J. E. Charlton, H. J. Michell, & S. L. Acoose (Eds.), Decolonizing mental
health: Embracing Indigenous multi-dimensional balance (pp. 309-324). JCharlton Publishing.
DeFehr, J. N. (2020). “Voluntarily, knowingly, and intelligently”: Protecting informed consent in
school-based mental health referrals. Brock Education: A Journal of Educational Research &
Practice, (29)1, 6-23.
DeFehr, J. (2018). Dialogic social inquiry: Attunement, responsivity, and answerability. International Journal of Collaborative-Dialogic Practices, 8(1), 27-43.
DeFehr, J. (2018). Indagacion Social Dialogica: Sinonizacion, Responsividad, y Responsabilidad.
International Journal of Collaborative-Dialogic Practices, 8(1), 27-43. (Spanish translation of above article).
DeFehr, J. (2017). Navigating psychiatric truth claims in collaborative practice: A proposal for
radical critical mental health awareness. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 36(3), 27-38.
DeFehr, J. N. (2016). Inventing Mental Health First Aid: The problem of psychocentrism. Studies in
Social Justice, 10(1), 18-35.
