Part‑time Instructors

A long-time practitioner, Shelagh joined the IDS department in 2020 as a part-time lecturer of INTD3002 – “Development in Practice”. 

Prior to that, she was Associate Director (Partnerships) at the Coady Institute, responsible for equitable partnership development, program planning and educational design. This included facilitation of courses on Re-thinking Partnership as well as ABCD.

This was preceded by 20+ years of international cooperation with partners around the globe, including: innovative international programming (Country Director, WUSC Sri Lanka), Volunteer Cooperation (Executive Director, VSO Canada), and numerous global organizations focused on Youth leadership and Peacebuilding.

Committed to coalition building and collaboration to influence positive change, Shelagh has worked in partnership with CSOs in South Asia, South-East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean; as well as with UN agencies such as ILO, UNOCHA and UNICEF.

She is also an active volunteer in Canadian networks, local community organizations and national boards. (including: Royal Roads University Advisory Council, GAC Covid-19 Solutions Team, Atlantic Council for International Cooperation)

As a practitioner, her research, conference presentations and publications include work on Equitable & Multi-stakeholder Partnerships, Facilitating Transformative Leadership Learning as well as Community Participation and Conflict Management.

She can be contacted at ssavage@dal.ca

Gianisa Adisaputri, M. Emergency Management (Auckland University of Technology), M.D. (State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah), is an award-winning scientist, physician, instructor and consultant. Dr. Adisaputri is an instructor in Dalhousie’s International Development Studies Department, and a PhD student in the Faculty of Health. Her research interests include access to healthcare, psychological resilience, and emergency management. Her dissertation investigates access to primary care among immigrant women in rural communities. Dr. Adisapurti has published several articles in leading journals, which have garnered over 200 academic citations, and won several notable awards, including New Zealand ASEAN Scholarship and the Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship. She is a frequent reviewer for several prestigious journals including The International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. Previously, she was a member of the Indonesian Medical Association, a medical manager at a multinational pharmaceutical company, and an English-Indonesian translator.

María José Yax-Fraser is an Indigenous K’iche woman in the diaspora. She is a feminist artivist, community and academic research practitioner, and mother of three children. María José is also a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at York University. Her dissertation explores the meaning of a welcoming community for immigrant and migrant mothers in K’jipuktuk (Halifax). Her areas of academic and community-based research include housing and migration, underemployment, immigrant attraction and retention. She has a personal interest in human rights, affordable housing, the intersections of gender and development, the rights of indigenous people in Turtle Island and Abya Yala, and the eradication of gender-based violence around the world.

As a feminist artivist and research practitioner, she constantly crosses academic and community boundaries. She has held part-time faculty positions at Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU)and Saint Mary’s University (SMU). As a course director at MSVU, she taught a course that explored Power, Inequality and Social Justice, offered by the Department of Social Anthropology. As a course director at SMU, she taught three courses in the Sociology and Criminology Department including Sociology of Developing Societies; Women, Migration, and Identity; and Women and Development. She also collaborated, as her service to the community, to offer a summer course for refugee claimants on the history of migration in Canada during her time at SMU. 

María José has also worked in settlement and migration, including forced migration, for the past twenty-eight years. She advocates for gender equality, equity and the advancement of women. She is a founding member of the Immigrant Migrant Women’s Association of Halifax (IMWAH).