Sheila Jennings
PhD

Background

Dr. Sheila Jennings earned her doctoral degree in law at Osgoode Hall Law School. Her research provided a litigation-based analysis of the legal barriers that mothers with severely disabled children face while attempting to realize their rights to support. In her project she presented a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms argument as having the potential to address these barriers. Sheila was the recipient of the Mary McEwan Memorial Award for feminist scholarship for her research. In addition to teaching in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University, she is interested in harm reduction and critical drug studies and advocates publicly through a national organization for the rights of individuals impacted in the overdose crisis. In this regard she guest-lectures at universities and colleges, having spoken at the invitation of University of Toronto Faculty of Law’s Mary and Philip Seeman Health Law, Ethics and Policy Series on the opioid crisis. She has previously practiced family law and mediation and has published in the area of family law, family mediation and disability.