PhD student
University of Toronto, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work
Viveka Ichikawa is a PhD Candidate at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto. She has pursued her personal and professional journey as an immigrant on Indigenous lands of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Viveka is a registered social worker in Ontario and British Colombia with over ten years of experience in Canada and Japan.
Her academic and clinical pursuits are firmly rooted in a social justice and human rights-centric approach and guided by anti-racism, decolonial, and anti-oppressive principles. Outside of academia, she works as a trauma-informed psychotherapist, holding an anti-oppressive, decolonial, and anti-racism space for LGBTQ2SI+, BIPOC, and refugee/migrant individuals, couples, and families.
She has been conducting studies with racialized and mixed-race groups in Canada and Japan, as well as contract-based social workers and LGBTQ+ refugees. Her dissertation research on mixed-race East Asian individuals in Canada employs a critical narrative analysis, utilizing semi-structured in-depth interviews to challenge colonially rooted racial categorizations—fixed, monolithic, and dismissive of the ambiguity, fluidity, and nuances of human diversity.
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