Full Time Faculty

Deborah McPhail is an Assistant Professor in Community Health Sciences. A critical health scholar who studies the social aspects of obesity, Dr. McPhail's interdisciplinary work has been published in such journals as Health and Place and Social Science & Medicine. Dr. McPhail obtained a PhD inWomen’s Studies from York University in 2010. Her doctoral dissertation, a feminist history of obesity discourse in twentieth-century Canada, is under advance contract for publication with the University of Toronto Press. Dr. McPhail's current work focuses on the interplay among obesity discourse, food access, traditional eating practices, and social inequalities. She is also developing research projects in the area of women’s and transpeople’s reproductive health, with particular emphases on issues of health equity and healthcare access. Other areas of interest include: critical theories of health and the body; feminist and qualitative research methods; gender studies; anti-racist and postcolonial studies; theories of class distinction and structural oppression; globalization and health inequity; intersectional experiences of health and illness.

Dr. McPhail has funds available for students interested in working on food justice, reproductive health, and/or critical obesity projects from a social science perspective. Please contact her for further details.
 
Selected Publications:
 
McPhail, D. (2013). “Resisting biopedagogies of obesity in a problem population: Understandings of healthy eating and healthy weight in a Newfoundland and Labrador community.” Critical Public Health, forthcoming.
McPhail, D., Chapman, G., & Beagan, B. (2013). “The rural and the rotund? A critical interpretation of food deserts and rural adolescent obesity in the Canadian context.” Health and Place, forthcoming.
McPhail, D., Beagan, B., & Chapman, G.E. (2012). “I don’t really want to be
sexist but–”: Denying and reinscribing gender through food. Food, Culture and Society 15 (3), 473-89.
McPhail, D., Chapman, G. E., & Beagan, B. (2011). “Too much of that stuff
can’t be good”: Canadian teens, morality, and fast food consumption. Social Science & Medicine 73(2), 301-7.
McPhail, D.  (2010). “This is the face of obesity”: Gender and the production of
emotional obesity in 1950s and 1960s Canada. Radical Psychology,
http://www.radicalpsychology.org/vol8-1/McPhail.html.
McPhail, D. (2009). What to do with “The Tubby Hubby”? “Obesity,” the crisis
of  masculinity, and the reification of the nuclear family in early Cold War Canada. Antipode 41(5), 1021-1050.
Sykes, H. & McPhail, D. (2008). Unbearable lessons: Contesting fat phobia in physical education. Sociology of Sport Journal 25, 66-96.