About

Karen Flynn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Department of African-American Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. in Women's Studies from York University, Toronto, Ontario, in 2003. Her research interests include migration and travel, Black Canada, health, popular culture, feminist, Diasporic, and post-colonial studies. Dr. Flynn’s work explores themes related to Black Canadian and Caribbean women in the African Canadian Diaspora, and she has published extensively on these topics. She authored the book 'Moving Beyond Borders: Black Canadian and Caribbean women in the African Canadian Diaspora,' which was published by the University of Toronto and received the Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association of the History of Nursing. Currently, she is working on a second book project that maps the travel itineraries of young Black EFL teachers across borders. In addition to her academic research, Dr. Flynn has contributed numerous editorials to Canada's largest ethnic newspaper Share, and has written op-eds for Now Magazine, the Toronto Star, and Rabble.ca, addressing contemporary issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and nation. Her academic roles include being an Associate Professor in multiple departments, and she has held positions such as Dean’s Fellow for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Conrad Humanities Fellow for LAS, recognizing her excellence in scholarship.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Geography
• Political Science
• Economics
• Demography
• Political economy
• Art
• Environmental health
• Economic geography
• Development economics
• Gender studies
• Geology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Cancer-Related Cognitive Impairment: A Survey of Speech-Language Pathologists' Knowledge, Training, and Attitudes

  Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups · 2024-11-04

  article

  Purpose: This study examined speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') professional knowledge, training experiences, and attitudes in assessing and treating individuals with cancer-related cognitive impairments (CRCIs). Understanding these concepts is necessary for evaluating SLPs' role in supporting individuals with CRCIs. Method: A web-based survey was completed by 147 SLPs over a 2-month period. The survey explored their professional knowledge, training, and attitudes regarding CRCI assessment and intervention. Results: Three quarters of participants reported some experience with individuals with CRCIs. Most participants reported that providing care for individuals with CRCIs was within the SLP scope of practice (97%) and an ethical responsibility (93%). Approximately 65% of participants completed some form of training for providing services for this population; 98% would pursue diagnostic training in the future, and 66% would pursue intervention training in the future. Regarding attitudes, 80% of participants shared that they were comfortable with the idea of providing cognitive-communication services to individuals with CRCIs, and almost all (97%) felt that cognitive-communication services were a medical necessity for this population. Additional analyses were conducted to assess the effect of years of experience on various aspects of professional knowledge and attitudes. Conclusions: SLPs were trained to assess and treat the cognitive-communication domains impacted by CRCIs. Recommendations for meeting this need are also discussed. Further research regarding the role of SLPs in the assessment and treatment of CRCIs is warranted.

  PublisherDOI

• Self-Report of Changes in Cognitive-Communication Function and Social Engagement Among Adults With Cancer-Related Cognitive Impairment

  American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology · 2024-07-29 · 1 citations

  article

  Purpose: This study aimed to examine the prevalence of cognitive-communication deficits in adult cancer survivors who reported experiencing cancer-related cognitive impairment (CRCI). The study also aimed to determine how these problems impact their ability to engage socially and find satisfaction in their social roles. Method: This study employed a cross-sectional survey to collect data from adult cancer survivors. The survey included questions on demographic characteristics, self-perceived cognitive-communication abilities, social engagement, and satisfaction with social participation. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, Spearman rank-order correlation, Mann–Whitney U tests, and Kruskal–Wallis H tests. Results: Of 172 participants, 78% completed the survey, with 109 self-reporting CRCI. The participants predominantly had breast cancer, and most were diagnosed with Stage II cancers. The results indicated self-perceived impairment in various cognitive-communication domains, with functional daily communication being the most affected. Participants reported more difficulty participating in social roles and activities than their overall satisfaction with social participation. This study explored the relationships between cognitive-communication scores and social engagement, considering variables such as education, cancer type, stage, age, and treatment. Conclusions: This study underscores the multidimensional nature of CRCI, emphasizing the importance of addressing both cognitive-communication and social aspects in interventions and support services. It highlights the clinical implications for speech-language pathology, suggesting a potential role in identifying and addressing cognitive-communication deficits. Future research needs are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Drug Overdose Death among Residents of Urban Census Tracts: How Granular Geographical Analyses Uncover Socioenvironmental Correlates in Cuyahoga County, Ohio

  Journal of Urban Health · 2024-12-03 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The trauma mantras: A memoir of prose poems By Adrie Kusserow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 176 pp.

  American Ethnologist · 2024-09-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir of Prose Poems, medical anthropologist and poet Adrie Kusserow strives to advance the growing movement within the social sciences to use arts-based ethnographic research tools. She begins by defining “AutoEthnography” as “qualitative research using self-reflection and writing to explore personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural and social meanings and understandings” (p. 5). Kusserow, through 69 short passages of poetic prose (two to four pages each), offers an ethnography on emotional responses to difficult events, what is commonly subsumed under the Western concept of trauma. She explores, illuminates, and complexifies how refugees and others experience loss and suffering, and how they shape, ignore, hold, succumb to, or survive this experience or find a sense of renewal in it. Kusserow also illustrates how responses to trauma are affected by racism, misogyny, stigma, and other structural and institutional inequities in Bhutan, Hong Kong, India, Nepal, Sudan, Sweden, Uganda, the US, and elsewhere. As an autobiography, Kusserow's book frames the data presented in the context of her own history and professional experiences as an anthropologist—white, privileged, female, often crossing borders and boundaries on her own. Her passages are woven throughout with elements of her own struggles with loss, fears of physical threats, and uncomfortable uncertainties arising from the unfamiliar and from the joys of discovery. Kusserow's autoethnographic passages are bold, empathic, intriguing, searing, and searching must-reads for people with lived experience of forced displacement and for both formal and informal students of refugees and suffering. This book speaks to a broad audience of social scientists, behavioral health clinicians, social workers, street outreach professionals, philosophers, travelers, poets, and lovers of the written word. One of the book's resounding themes is that trauma is a malleable noun with different meanings and consequences for those suffering it. The author lures us into a better understanding of how to listen to and take stock of others’ stories, and how to best ameliorate their struggles and suffering—immediate, urgent, ultimate challenges for medical anthropologists. Acknowledging the embedded assumptions of those with narrow lives who examine the lives of others, she leaves us to wonder if trauma can ever be seen where it really is. She opens with “The Trouble with Stories,” writing, “This is a story of a story I wanted to be the hero of, but wasn't. I wanted to tell it over and over, propping it up on prominent display back in the great USA, until I rose like an angel from my perpetual shame” (p. 3). The story Kusserow wanted to tell of her role in rescuing a young girl kidnapped into a brothel in India became a story of the girl's story “she'd boxed up so neatly for me” (p. 4). The girl, aware she was being observed, told the story she wanted to be heard. take a flowing quantum soup, congeal it into solids using the blunt antennae of limited senses. The way our language reinforces this, with its subjects and predicates, supposedly solid nouns and active verbs, masculine and feminine objects. Then the sentences, further molded fictions that stick together, misrepresent. Then whole concepts, hastily padded, packed, shaped, and thrown, before the other side can pelt them down. (p. 105) Kusserow also chastises the Western-centric dogma of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). She illuminates the “well meaning Traumasphere” (p. 46) in which we live, wherein we more readily emphasize our victimhood while loosely describing our everyday experiences as traumatizing. In her passage, Trauma, Inc., she finds that her college students score significantly higher for post-traumatic stress disorder than South Sudanese refugee girls. Kusserow comments that “Trauma Inc. is ravenous and cocky, it knows it's got a good thing going. It snorts whole white lines of history religion, politics, removing them from the context of suffering” (p. 47). In “Psychocolonialism,” she illustrates the incompleteness of the DSM. Kusserow writes of Jaio, an anorexic woman in Hong Kong, who has lost her grandmother, Nai Nai: “Too weak to rise, she floats in a haze of light-headedness, what Nai Nai calls blocked qi, an excess of yin, a depleted yang. How old-fashioned how quaint” (p. 71). She wanted to be picked up like a mother dog grabs the slack of her loose-necked pup, to be folded up, and slid into the warm pink pocket of the woman's body, sipping at the walls of fat. She wanted to go back, eyes open in the warm fluid, lungs soft as petals, bones light as cartilage, before the shock of sun blasts in and the waters recede, revealing the islands bright and stubborn, borders quickly staking their claim. When she told the doctor of her longings, he told her the DSM had no diagnosis for symptoms like that. Now, she is a modern girl, with a modern illness, its capped teeth gawking from People, Self, Vogue. She knows it did not start this way, like the Western doctors described, but, tired of being lonely, her symptoms never just right, she learned the real ones eagerly, like a refugee scarfing down the language needed to survive. (p. 72) It even tried to assault the guidance counselor. But she would have none of it. She knew where to put horror, to slap it with a DSM label, while slipping me a pill with a V on its back, and letting me hide in a closet that smelled of ammonia. After that I had a disorder that barked like a sergeant. Directions, protocols were to be followed, experts consulted, therapist guidelines to be followed, pills swallowed. Each time my horror's raw scream tried to jump out, it saw no one it knew, turned around, and jumped right back into that DSM label, feeling stamped, cramped, and lonely, but accepting it as my fate. (p. 36) I tell my students we Psychopomorphize the twitching blob in the crib, and play pin the tail on the donkey with Freud. And thus begins our descent into the Psychologized Self, where a gas bubble crowning from a “grin” means she's confident, happy, when just as easily we could have spoken of spirits, clouds, dreams, the moon, creation myths, the mycelial web's magnetic pull, or nothing at all. (p. 26) Jésus who for all practical purposes did nothing to stop her gang rape in Essex, Vermont (instead of the Congo, rape capital of the world). … For days, the pig raced inside her head, shredding sirens of sound while Jésus did nothing from his perch on the La-Z-Boy, listless, like he'd had too much weed. (p. 101) You see, the Lonely Planet doesn't tell you that under the guise of Buddhism many evil things lurk. That in Shangri La, you have to be careful which men you go to for help, because not all of them are what they seem, especially the Western ones who wait for you to come knocking on their door, crouched like wolves under the hoods of their little red monk robes, their teeth glistening as you walk in and tell them you just want to learn about the Dharma. (p. 7) Trauma Mantras’ passages are perhaps best read a few at a time. They are brave, educational examples elevating ethnographic research methods in ways deserving careful consideration by anyone with an interest in using acutely nuanced language and an artistic aesthetic to present multilayered cultural meanings.

  PublisherDOI

• Risk of Drug Overdose Death among Residents of Urban Census Tracts with Low-Level Opportunity:  How Granular Geographical Analyses Uncovers Socioenvironmental Correlates of Drug-related Mortality in Cuyahoga County, Ohio

  Research Square · 2024-06-17 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Humanitarian aid and the everyday invisibility of climate-related migration from Central America

  Climate and Development · 2024 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This article examines how everyday practices of humanitarian documentation shape the visibility of climate-related migration from Central America. Based on participant observation and interviews with migrants at a humanitarian aid shelter in Mexico, we argue that existing documentation practices may contribute to the everyday erasure of climate-related migration. We observed that migrants rarely mentioned climate change during routine shelter intake interviews, which primarily revolve around interpersonal violence as a driver of forced displacement from Central America. However, in the context of follow-up interviews, migrants explained that such interpersonal violence is often structured in complex ways by climate-related vulnerabilities. Interviews revealed that a variety of climate-related drivers, including inconsistent rainfall variability, deforestation, and land dispossession underlie and exacerbate the forms of interpersonal violence that existing legal regimes consider deserving of legal recognition. Our findings suggest that climate change as a driver of displacement may be obscured in everyday humanitarian encounters. They also point to the role that humanitarian spaces such as migrant shelters might play in documenting and drawing attention to climate-related forced displacement. Finally, we discuss how our findings contribute to emerging academic and policy discussions regarding the integration of climate-related displacement into existing humanitarian legal regimes.

  PublisherDOI

• In Search of What Better Life?Rethinking Caribbean Migrationto Canada

  Histoire sociale · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Caribbean migration to Canada is often discussed through the trope of migrants searching for “a better life.” This framework ignores and obscures migration histories and patterns of certain groups, including other compelling reasons for migration. The experiences of study abroad students, teachers, and nurses broaden the current conceptualization of Caribbean migration by being attentive to transnational practices that involve nonconventional routes, such as first- and second-generation Caribbean Canadians who travelled from Canada to East Asia to teach English in the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s. Caribbean migration is best conceptualized through a continuum, which better accounts for a confluence of dynamic, often interrelated drivers of migration, including but not limited to labour demands, education, family and other relationships, increased access to travel, and a desire to experience other parts of the world.

  PublisherDOI

• In Search of What Better Life? Rethinking Caribbean Migration to Canada

  Histoire sociale · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Geography

  Caribbean migration to Canada is often discussed through the trope of migrants searching for “a better life.” This framework ignores and obscures migration histories and patterns of certain groups, including other compelling reasons for migration. The experiences of study abroad students, teachers, and nurses broaden the current conceptualization of Caribbean migration by being attentive to transnational practices that involve nonconventional routes, such as first- and second-generation Caribbean Canadians who travelled from Canada to East Asia to teach English in the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s. Caribbean migration is best conceptualized through a continuum, which better accounts for a confluence of dynamic, often interrelated drivers of migration, including but not limited to labour demands, education, family and other relationships, increased access to travel, and a desire to experience other parts of the world.

  PublisherDOI

• Educating communication sciences and disorders students to use evidence-based practice literature: A collaboration between a library liaison and a CSD professor

  College & Undergraduate Libraries · 2022-10-02 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  This case study focuses on the importance of library liaison and teaching faculty collaborations, specifically in communication sciences and disorders. The ongoing, three-year collaboration emphasized enhancing Communication Sciences and Disorders curricula to facilitate students in acquiring the necessary research skills during their first-, second-, and third-year of undergraduate studies so that they can efficiently transition to graduate school and then to function as skilled clinicians who comprehend, value, and utilize research skills that support them using evidence-based practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Patients’ Perspectives on Emergency Department COVID-19 Vaccination and Vaccination Messaging Through Randomized Vignettes

  Public Health Reports · 2022-04-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  OBJECTIVES: Emergency departments (EDs) could play an important role in the COVID-19 pandemic response by reaching patients who would otherwise not seek vaccination in the community. Prior to expanding COVID-19 vaccination to the acute care setting, we assessed ED patients' COVID-19 vaccine status, perspectives, and hypothetical receptivity to ED-based vaccination. METHODS: From January 11 through March 31, 2021, we conducted a multisite (Albany Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Buffalo General Hospital, University of Cincinnati Medical Center, and Upstate Medical Center), cross-sectional survey of ED patients, with embedded randomization for participants to receive 1 of 4 vignette vaccination messages (simple opt-in message, recommendation by the hospital, community-oriented message, and acknowledgment of vaccine hesitancy). Main outcomes included COVID-19 vaccination status, prior intention to be vaccinated, and receptivity to randomized hypothetical vignette messages. RESULTS: Of 610 participants, 122 (20.0%) were vaccinated, 234 (38.4%) had prior intent to be vaccinated, 111 (18.2%) were unsure as to prior intent, and 143 (23.4%) had no prior intent to be vaccinated. Vaccine hesitancy (participants who were vaccine unsure or did not intend to receive the vaccine) was associated with the following: age <45 years, female, non-Hispanic Black, no primary health care, and no prior influenza vaccination. Overall, 364 of 565 (64.4%; 95% CI, 60.3%-68.4%) were willing to accept a hypothetical vaccination in the ED. Among participants with prior vaccine hesitancy, a simple opt-in message resulted in the highest acceptance rates to hypothetical vaccination (39.7%; 95% CI, 27.6%-52.8%). CONCLUSIONS: EDs have appropriate patient populations to initiate COVID-19 vaccination programs as a supplement to community efforts. A simple opt-in approach may offer the best messaging to reach vaccine-hesitant ED patients.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rob Lyerla

  Western Michigan University

  5 shared

• Kieran J. Fogarty

  5 shared

• Patricia L. Geels

  5 shared

• Nicole M. Brown

  Saint Mary's College of California

  4 shared

• Cynthia Pope

  Syracuse University

  4 shared

• Mark Van Moer

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  3 shared

• Assata Zerai

  3 shared

• Michael L. Black

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  Harvard University

  1997

• M. Phil., Anthropology

  University of Cambridge

  1986

Awards & honors

• Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association of the H…
• Conrad Humanities Fellow for LAS (2015)