Stephaney Patrick

Stephaney Patrick is a doctoral candidate and a University of Manitoba Graduate Fellowship (UMGF) recipient at the University of Manitoba, where she is pursuing her studies in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program under the supervision of Dr. Sean Byrne. Before coming to Manitoba, she completed two postgraduate programs: MA in Coexistence and Conflict and MA in International Sustainable Development in the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in Boston. Both degrees were funded by the Joint Japan World Bank Scholarship Program. Prior to that, she received a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of the West Indies in Political Science. Stephaney’s career has spanned over ten years as a civil servant working with the Government of Jamaica as a Development Specialist and Policy Analyst. Her work involved approaching violence as a public health issue and using a cross-sectoral collaboration approach to strengthen volatile communities’ governance framework to prevent crime and violence. She is passionate about creating spaces for the inclusion of young peoples’ voices in political decision-making. The topic of her PhD research is Envisioning Pathways to Post-War Peace: The Views of Young Sri Lankan Tamils Living in Canada and the UK. Stephaney has worked on summary content and review for Spectrum's newsletter and website since becoming a Spectrum Fellow in 2021. Spectrum’s application of the decolonization approach to research provides opportunities to hone skills that seek to modify policies, procedures, and programs that will be better suited to address health system systemic issues. Her research interests include violence as a public health issue, young people engagement in political decision-making and peacebuilding, social justice, ethnic conflicts, culture of violence, peace education, peacebuilding practices and leadership. She’s also interested in ways the trauma-informed and decolonization approaches can be applied to redress systems of structural violence that discriminate, marginalize and exclude vulnerable groups politically, economically and socially. In her spare time, she likes to counsel young people, teach Bible study sessions, sing, and dance.