Vanessa Vegter, MSc (She/They)

PhD Candidate 
University of Calgary 
Werklund School of Education 
2500 University Drive NW 
Calgary AB  T2N 1N4 
Canada

Phone: +1-403-804-7072
Email: vmvegter@ucalgary.ca 
Web: communitystrengths.org/about

Vanessa Vegter is a researcher and counselor , whose current research explores multi-specied entanglements and rural mental well-being. Specifically, Vanessa is interested in how rural people make sense of and engage in mental well-being in their daily lives, and how human-animal relationships of all kinds feature in these understanding and practices. For her field of study synthesis, Vanessa explored a dominant “discourse of deficit” in the construction of rural mental health in counseling and mental health literature. For her Master’s thesis research, Vanessa utilized Situational Analysis (SA) to explore the messiness feminist counselor professional identity construction and maintenance. She also acted as a research assistant supporting Dr. Tom Strong’s exploration of medicalizing trends in counseling and counsellor education. 

Vanessa holds a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of Calgary, where she is currently completing her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Tanya Mudry. She has co-published articles on medicalization in the field of counseling psychology, SA mapping as a creative resource for counseling practice, and recently authored a counseling textbook chapter on gender diversity. She has provided several guest lectures for master’s level students on constructionist approaches to counseling, research, and clinical supervision. Vanessa has also had the opportunity to join Dr. Kristin Bodiford and Community Strengths, a team of consultants, with whom Vanessa has provided support in curriculum development, education outreach, and program development, particularly around trauma-informed work and violence prevention.

Vanessa has trained in narrative therapy and family therapy (the latter at the Calgary Family Therapy Centre) and is currently completing her pre-doctoral internship at the University of Victoria Student Wellness Centre. She is particularly drawn to constructionist approaches to counseling practice and supervision. In her practice, Vanessa emphasizes collaboration and creativity, and she embraces complexity and multiplicity, and the tensions therein, as sites of generative potential. 

In addition to her interest in the thinking, saying, and doing or rural people in regard to their mental well-being (in co-constituting entanglements with critters of all kinds), Vanessa has become increasingly curious about how offerings from constructionist, post-humanist, and new materialist thinkers might invite the field of counseling psychology around “the animal turn.”