Ireh Iyioha, PhD
Visiting Assistant Professor Irehobhude Iyioha receives Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT) Award
Article by Priscilla Popp and Ben Freeland
First appeared on the University of Alberta Law website April 19, 2017 - Reproduced here for archival purpose.
When Visiting Assistant Professor Irehobhude Iyioha first joined UAlberta Law last fall, she couldn’t possibly have predicted the amount of professional success she would enjoy in such a short amount of time.
Most recently, on April 4, Iyioha presented at the National Health Ethics Conference at the University of Alberta. The conference is part of National Health Ethics Week, an annual initiative of the Clinical Ethics Service, Alberta Health Services and John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre at the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry wherein health organizations, educational institutions, health care professionals, community organizations, and members of the general public participate in educational events that explore health ethics issues.
In her presentation “Patient Identity, Social Disparities and Harm Reduction: Towards an Intersectional Approach to Ethical Health Service Delivery,” Iyioha discussed health services research studies that point to increasing accounts of institutional discrimination against racialized individuals, especially immigrants and those of Aboriginal descent. She used the concept of intersectionality to explore how attention to the intersections of socially-constructed identities and existing power structures and the ways in which they create inequality can inform an ethical approach to health service delivery.
Two days later, Iyioha had another reason to celebrate: she was selected for a 2017 Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT) Award – given for a scholarly paper that makes a substantial contribution to legal literature. This makes her the third scholar associated with UAlberta Law (following Vice Dean Yahya in 2007 and Professor Eric Adams in 2014) to be inducted into this distinguished group of scholars.
Iyioha’s submission “Law, Normative Limits and Women’s Health: Towards a Jurisprudence of Substantive Effectiveness” was one of three papers recognized by CALT in 2017. The paper explores the limits of law around women’s health and examines whether the nominal returns from laws designed to improve women’s health can be traced to the conceptual structure of law or to broader contextual factors extrinsic to law.
“Our review committees were gratified by the considerable response from colleagues across the country – and were struck by the extremely high quality of the papers we received,” wrote University of Ottawa Professor Craig Forcese and University of Saskatchewan Associate Professor John Kleefeld in their congratulatory letter to Iyioha.
“It is clear that legal scholarship in Canada is flourishing. The three papers we singled out seem to us to capture the best features of legal scholarship, each in a different way.”
The CALT award, which will be formally presented at CALT’s annual conference, held this year in Victoria from June 8-10, was a fitting conclusion to a busy year for Prof. Iyioha.
In the days following her presentation at the National Health Ethics Conference, Prof. Iyioha presented at the Africa Center, an organization with a long legacy of advancing and empowering women in Edmonton. In an extended celebration of the International Women’s Day’s theme “Be Bold for Change”, Iyioha was one of five distinguished women, including Professor Jennifer Kelly, former Department Chair of Educational Policy Studies at UAlberta, who were invited as key speakers at the event. Additionally, in March, Iyioha participated at the University of Alberta Career Centre’s Gender in the Workplace Speaker Series – where she spoke to students about the role of gender in choosing a career path, and last year, she presented a paper at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School for a conference on Canadian/Anglophone African Human Rights Engagements: A Critical Assessment of the Literature and a Research Agenda.
Congratulations to Prof. Iyioha on an amazing year of professional accomplishments!