Megan Aston

Biography

Megan Aston, RN, PhD, is a Full Professor at Dalhousie University School of Nursing. She is the Associate Director of Research and International Affairs and the Director of the Centre for Transformative Nursing and Health Research. Her teaching expertise includes qualitative health research, and family and community health nursing. Her program of research is guided by feminist poststructuralism and focuses on family, perinatal, child, and newborn health. She uses feminist poststructuralism informed by discourse analysis to examine how nurses, health care professionals, and clients negotiate beliefs, values, and practices that have been socially and institutionally constructed through relations of power. She has secured provincial and national funding to support research studies in Nova Scotia and Tanzania. These include: the virtual village online postpartum support sessions, mapping mothers’ social networks; postpartum home visits; hospital experiences of children with intellectual disabilities, their parents, and nurses; 2SLGBTQ+ compassion; queer women’s birthing experiences; obesity management; and nurses’ bereavement support experiences.

Publications

• Aston, M., Price, S., MacLeod, A., Stone, K., Benoit, B., Joy, P., Ollivier, R., Sim, M., Etowa, J., Jack, S., Marcellus, L., Iduye, D. (2024). Examining how postpartum videoconferencing support sessions can facilitate connections between parents: A poststructural and sociomaterial
  analysis. Nursing Reports.
• Ollivier, R., Aston, M., Price, S., Sheppard-LeMoine, D., & Steenbeek, A. (2023). 'Feeling Ready': A Feminist Poststructural Analysis of Postpartum Sexual Health. Qualitative Health Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323231209842
• Price, S., Aston, M., MacLeod, A., Stone, K., Jack, S., Benoit, B., Ollivier, R., Joy, P., Iduye, D. (2023). Perceptions of safety in the virtual space: Exploring parents' experiences with postpartum support groups using videoconferencing. The American Journal of Maternal Child Nursing.
• Gallant, M., MacNeil, M., Al-Rassi, J., Mann, C., Falconer, A., McLeod, R., Aston, M., & Cassidy, C. (2022).  Implementation and evaluation of the Eat, Sleep, Console Model of Care for babies diagnosed with neonatal abstinence syndrome: A Scoping Review Protocol. Healthy Populations Journal. http://hdl.handle.net/10222/81989
• Stone, K., Hamilton Hinch, B., Aston, M., Rainham, D., & Spencer, B. (2023). “It’s not something we like to think about because it’s so devastating”: Understanding Eastern Canadian Young Women’s Mental Health in our Changing Climate. Journal of Prevention and Health Promotion.
• MacLeod, A., Aston, M., Price, S., Stone, K., Ollivier, R., Benoit, B., Sim, M., Marcellus, L., Jack, S., Joy, P., Gholampourch, M., Iduye, D. (2023). “There’s an etiquette to Zoom that’s not really present in-person”: A qualitative study showing how the mute button shapes virtual postpartum support for new parents. Qualitative health research. 10.1177/10497323231187541