Mary Ellen Purkis Ph.D., RN, Holly Symonds Brown Ph.D., RN, and Christine Ceci Ph.D., RN

Mary Ellen Purkis Ph.D., RN, retired from her academic position at the University of Victoria after teaching in the School of Nursing for 12 years and then serving as Dean of the Faculty of Human and Social Development for 10 years. She continues to make intellectual contributions to the field of care for seniors, particularly those living in community. Mary Ellen is particularly interested in the connections and disconnections between seniors living in community and the community health and social services designed to help them remain there.

Holly Symonds Brown Ph.D., RN, is a nurse researcher interested in community living with dementia. She is a graduate of Queen’s University (BScN), Rush University (MSN) and University of Alberta (Ph.D.). She works as an Assistant Professor, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta. Holly’s research to date has focused on how day programs work for people living with dementia and their families at home. Her research uses methods that allow her to explore the relations and specificities of people's arrangements of daily life at home and in the community.

Christine Ceci Ph.D., RN, is an associate professor in the Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta. Her program of research includes empirical and theoretical work concerned with the organization of care practices for frail older people, currently focused on the situations of families in which one member has dementia. This site is of interest in part because it rests uneasily in that boundary zone between health and social care, a threshold where the goals of practices may be vague — supporting independence or enhancing quality of life — and the activities difficult to justify in the economic terms currently dominating most social and political discourse regarding state roles in relation to social welfare. Action at these thresholds relies on exposition, a setting forth of reasons, rationales, justifications, and as many have observed, such exposition is a pre-eminent place of political struggle.

With Kristin Bjornsdottir and Mary Ellen Purkis, she is a co-editor of Perspectives on Care at Home for Older People, and a collaborator in the Care Practices Research Network.