EDI Speaker Series: Lin Fang- Anti-Asian Racism and Social Work- Room 548

Lin Fang is an Associate Professor and the endowed Factor-Inwentash Chair in Children’s Mental Health. She is also the Founder and Director of FIFSW’s Talk It Out Counseling Clinic. With over 10 years of postgraduate clinical experience, Lin’s program of research focuses on advancing the theoretical and empirical knowledge of positive child and youth development through etiology and intervention research as well as community-based research and services. Versed with a range of research methodologies and advanced statistics, Lin has published and presented widely in the areas of adolescent substance use, information and communication technologies (ICTs), and mental health and cross-cultural experiences among immigrant communities.

In recent years, Lin has concentrated her scholarship on community-based research, examining how neighborhood and structural factors shape lived experiences of young people, and how young people, in turn, engage and understand the world they live. Her research uses community-based participatory and arts-based methods. Some of her projects include ’This is My Regent Park’: Perspectives from Young People, a SSHRC-funded project that unpacked young people’s place-knowledges to understand how they define and relate to their neighbourhood of Regent Park as Regent Park is undergoing a major redevelopment; and My Script My Voice, a university-community collaboration to empower Asian youth and families in the face of Anti-Asian Racism (AAR). Currently, she is the Principal Investigator for Project APPA, a 3-year research project funded by SSHRC that utilizes participatory action research to work with Asian parents and other stakeholders to promote capacity building, build knowledge and resources, and curate an Asian-centred approach against AAR.

Coming from a community organizing background, Lin takes pride in advancing social work while doing social work in the community. During the pandemic, Lin conceived and launched the Talk It Out Counseling Clinic, where supervised MSW students at FIFSW provide free short-term counseling services and community-based mental health initiatives to communities that face multiples challenges, as well as those who from Black and other racialized communities. In its first 2.5 years, the Clinic has trained 39 MSW students to provide services to over 450 clients and residents in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Today, as we transition through the pandemic, Talk It Out continues to serve and innovate, striving to be a mental health hub that enables trained social work students to work with communities that need them the most.

Lin teaches in the Health and Mental Health Field of Study in the MSW program and research methods in the PhD Program. She is known for being able to effectively blend knowledge and skills of clinical practice with theories and research evidence in her presentations. She is the recipient of the 2015-2016 Teaching Award at FIFSW.