Dr. Merlinda Weinberg
Dr. Weinberg is a tenured professor in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She has been on the faculties of both the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California and Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She received her Masters of Social Work from Smith College in Massachusetts and practiced social work in the United States and Canada as a clinician, manager, and consultant. Her employment, as a practitioner, for over 25 years covered both a range of settings – out-patient, day treatment and residential settings – as well positions as front-line worker, supervisor and manager. She also had a private practice and consulting business for social service professionals. It was during her years as a practitioner that her interest in questions of ethics developed, leading her to pursue a doctorate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (part of the University of Toronto) where she received a PhD in the Sociology of Equity Studies in Education in 2004.
She has completed her third research study on ethics and has published in a range of scholarly publications. She is currently working on a fourth project on inclusion and exclusion for marginalized individuals in the professionals. Her areas of interest in research have focused on ethics in the helping professions, the construction of professional identity, the impact of diversity and neoliberalism on professional practice, the use of discourse analysis, and critical feminist post-structural theory. She has presented at numerous conferences in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Italy, and has been the keynote speaker at a number of professional symposia. She is a passionate teacher, with students consistently rating her highly as an effective instructor. Dr. Weinberg was nominated for the Aurora Prize as the top new researcher in Canada by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for the research on ethics in social work practice that you can find on this website.