Guelph, Ontario
Email: osmoliak@uoguelph.ca
Web: https://family.uoguelph.ca/people/olga-smoliak

Olga Smoliak is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph, Canada. She is also a psychologist and family therapist/supervisor. Her research is dedicated to advancing critical and discursive perspectives (social constructionist, poststructuralist, feminist, new materialist) in psychotherapy and family therapy. She has taken a social constructionist approach to psychotherapy and has explored the links between discourse or language use and therapeutic practices. In particular, she uses conversation analysis, (critical/feminist) discourse analysis, and discursive psychology to investigate how psychological matters are constituted discursively and how therapeutic and diagnostic interactions operate in practice. She also studies gender in its intersections in close relationships and in couple and family therapy. She currently uses participatory, arts-based methods of inquiry to examine care work and its gendering in families.