Global Health News

Date: March 13, 2015
Time: 12:00 - 12:30pm
Location: Rm 104, Weldon Law Building
Speaker: Fiona Martin, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University

Fiona Martin is a sociologist who engages in a theoretically- and critically-informed analysis of health. Her work explores the ways in which social relationships, structural conditions, and cultural meanings influence people’s health-related beliefs and actions, specifically in relation to drug use. She also explores how larger sociopolitical and ideological contexts influence the kinds of supports, both preventative and treatment-focused, that are made available to different groups of drug users.

Dr. Martin is currently studying the availability of harm reduction services in the Atlantic Provinces, in particular, methadone maintenance treatment for opiate-dependent pregnant women in Nova Scotia. She is also critically analyzing how the causes and consequences of women’s “substance abuse” are currently framed in the epidemiological and clinical literature. Dr. Martin’s previous research, undertaken in Australia, explored the social networks and social meanings that inform key moments in drug-using trajectories; her focus was on young women injecting drug users’ experiences of pregnancy and motherhood.