U of T Faculty of Social Work has first Black Dean
December 28, 2019
After two decades at the University of Chicago, Dr. Dexter Voisin was seeking change.
With vast experience in the areas of community violence, mental health and HIV prevention, he was looking to lead a Faculty of Social Work that’s valued by the institution and amenable to innovation and change.
Voisin found that at the University of Toronto where he signed a five-year contract last July to be the Dean of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.
As the oldest School of Social Work in Canada having been founded 105 years ago, the Faculty has been on the cutting edge of education, policy, research and social work practice.
“It’s quite a well respected, productive and impactful faculty,” said Voisin who is the first non-White to hold the senior faculty position. “But more importantly, it’s one that’s supported by the central administration. All Schools of Social Work, in general, have similar missions on paper when they talk about social justice, inclusion, social uplift and inequality. I, however, found that this faculty is more than just a mission statement on paper. It has legs and it is an impressive cohort of faculty who are doing work with the community.”
With other members, the new Dean is in the process of crafting a shared vision to advance the Faculty that offers a professional/academic program of study leading to a Master of Social Work and a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
“We have to be innovative to address some of the social issues in society and that means thinking outside the box,” Voisin, who holds the Sandra Rotman Chair in Social Work at U of T, pointed out. “We have to work with not only social workers, but with social work researchers and individuals in public health, psychology, medicine, education, kinesiology, thinking about interdisciplinary approaches that would lead us to the whole notion of impact. The other thing is that about a third of our full-time and tenure track faculty of about 30 are doing global work, so we have to internationalize.”
Voisin brings a wealth of experience to his new role having served as Professor in the School of Social Service Administration conducting numerous studies that sought to better understand the various ways in which community violence exposure impacts the mental health, educational and sexual trajectories of urban youth, with a major focus towards HIV prevention and intervention.
When he joined the American university in 1999 just after graduating with his PhD from Columbia University School of Social Work, Voisin was the only scholar out of nearly 2,000 tenure-track and tenured faculty members university-wide doing work in the area of STIs (sexually transmitted diseases) and HIV prevention.
“As a junior faculty member, I worked with senior colleagues to recruit and attract other faculty doing work in this area,” he recounted. “Over the course of seven years, we were able to build two university-wide centres of which I became Director and Co-director. I basically sort of cut my teeth at the University of Chicago in terms of my administrative experience, working and developing authentic relationships with the community and outside stakeholders and connecting the university to communities. I and my colleagues also raised over $10 million in extramural funding and built university partnerships. So all the functions of a Dean, when you think about recruitment, mentoring, hiring, developing a strategic vision, working with students and dealing with curricula issues are all experiences that I was fortunate to get during my tenure at the University of Chicago.”
The last of three children born and raised in Trinidad & Tobago, Voisin – who attended Curepe Fatima RC, Tranquility Government Secondary and St. Augustine Senior Comprehensive schools -- worked in the banking and airline industries before migrating to the United States in 1988.
With Social Work not considered a recognized profession in the Caribbean four decades ago, he aspired to be a Psychologist.
It was while doing his first degree at St. Andrews University in North Carolina that he stumbled upon Social Work and completed a Master’s and PhD in the discipline.
“I always knew that I wanted work helping individuals achieve their potential,” he said. “Looking back, I realize my parents, in many ways, were role models in terms of the community work they did. I didn’t have the language of Social Work, but my mother worked with kids in an orphanage. My dad, though he was a police officer, engaged in community work. They were my role models for what I later came to know as Social Work.”
Irma Voisin passed away this year, leaving her 85-year-old husband, Cecil Voisin, a widower.
Voisin’s dad second cousin, Daisy Voisin, was considered the ‘Queen of Parang’. A street bearing her name in Siparia, South Trinidad was unveiled in October.
Living and working in Chicago in the last two decades, Voisin saw first-hand the trauma experienced by residents affected by gun violence in a city with a high homicide rate.
Lengthy research and familiarity with community violence and trauma led to the publication of ‘America The Beautiful And Violent: Black Youth & Neighbourhood Trauma in Chicago’, which was released by Columbia University Press last August.
In the 312-page book launched in Toronto at A Different Booklist on November 23, Voisin provides a compelling and social justice-oriented analysis of current trends in neighbourhood violence in light of the historical and structural factors that have reproduced entrenched patterns of racial and economic inequality.
“In doing dozens of media interviews on the topic, I realized that a lot of those lengthy conversations got reduced to a sound byte that always simplified very complex issues,” he said. “It occurred to me that a manuscript was needed to tell the story from the perspective of communities, young people and their families around structural violence in America. We think about America as the land of opportunity and that is part of the narrative, but the other side of the United States has not been told in terms of its violent policies towards people of colour and poor Whites, looking at America’s social policy and structural inequality and how it has created enclaves of neighbourhoods where there are high concentrations of poverty and violence.”
Voisin, who has published over 135 peer-review articles, said the book is really meant to tell the story of community trauma from the perspective of its participants.
“It employs a diverse perspective in terms of drawing from the fields of Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work, Criminology, education, mental health and history,” he said. “It takes a decolonized approach to talking about the experiences of violence and tells it from a perspective of community.”
With gang and gun violence rising in the Greater Toronto Area, Voisin said there is an opportunity learn what worked and what hasn’t worked in the United States.
“What has not worked is trying to arrest the problem away,” he said. “In terms of policing, surveillance, arresting, those things will not curb – in my estimation – the increase of violence in Toronto.
Tackling the root causes of violence such as mental health, education and employment will go a long way, said Voisin, in alleviating gun and gang violence.
“You have to address the structural drivers of violence,” he added. “You have to look at structural inequality as while Canada is becoming more diverse, it is also becoming less affordable for many pockets of Torontonians. Poverty is becoming more racialized in Canada and being borne on the backs of people of colour. When you have that happening, you will have what we call two Canadas or two Torontos in the same way that there are two Americas. When people are excluded from the workforce, they aren’t able to complete school and they aren’t seeing opportunities for their future. So, they are going to see their lives as expendable and the lives of other people that look like them as expendable. A llot of the crime in the Greater Toronto Area is focussed within groups and not across groups and that’s because when individuals see themselves as excluded from mainstream and not having opportunities to achieve their full citizenship as Canadians, they are going to go into alternative groups like gangs.”
