Skip to Main Content
You are now in the main content area
A close-up headshot of Yukari Seko with straight and short black hair. She wears a black textured blazer, a white blouse, and a gold chain necklace. She is smiling slightly against a plain light background.

Yukari Seko

Graduate Program Director, Associate Professor

Yukari Seko is an associate professor and graduate program director at the School of Professional Communication and Director for the Centre for Studies in Food Security. Since 2019, she has been serving as a member of the Research Ethics Board at TMU. Before joining ProCom, Yukari completed a CIHR-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and an SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Guelph’s Self-Injury and eMental Health Lab.

https://lunchboxshaming.blog.ryerson.ca/ 

My program of research is grounded on critical theory to address health inequity and advance social inclusion. Much of my work takes a critical narrative approach to inquire the role communication can play in disrupting oppressive systems and in more equitable distributing power.

My research encompasses an eclectic mix of transdisciplinary topics, including immigration and food, ageing, mental health, disability studies, solution-focused communication, and research ethics. I have been trained in, and taught, qualitative and quantitative methods, ranging from arts-informed research, interviews, focus groups, surveys, narrative analysis, and auto-ethnography. However, my expertise always resides in critical narrative inquiry. Much of my work takes a critical narrative approach to research with historically marginalized people in our society, including people with physical and mental disabilities and racialized persons whose voices are frequently engulfed by labels of deviance and/or abnormalities. Listening to people’s lived experience narratives requires careful explorations into their discursive milieu, as people’s stories never exist in a cultural vacuum.

My current program of research encompasses three broad topics: 1) food shaming in the Canadian school food environment; 2) culturally appropriate food and healthy ageing; and 3) solution-focused communication in clinical and non-clinical education/ Check Lunchbox Shaming project blog.

Selected publications (also see ResearchGate (external link) )

* students or trainees