Heidi Rimke | The University of Winnipeg (original) (raw)

Dr. Heidi Rimke, PhD is a Sociologist and Criminologist, and the Acting Coordinator of Disability Studies at the University of Winnipeg where she has worked as a professor since 2006. She focuses on health, wellness, illness, disability, and death, as well as criminality and deviance in historical and contemporary contexts, primarily as public safety and public health concerns. Her areas of research and teaching include medicalization; the social determinants of health and illness; self-help literature and therapeutic cultures; morality and ethics; religion, spirituality and the afterlife; organizational misconduct and wrongdoing; suicide and suicidology; academic inequality, the myth of meritocracy and PSE quality control failures; unsafe and unhealthy workplaces, especially in unionized environments; medicine and psychiatry; criminology and the sociology of deviance; child abuse and exploitation; trauma studies as well as bullying and mobbing behaviour. As a sociological theorist she has created the concept of ‘psychocentrism’ or ‘psycentrism’ to critically analyze human scientific problems, discourses, practices, and narratives that attempt to erase the social dimension of existence. Her many studies, conducted since the 1990s, have developed this sociological theory to analyze the growing and costly social problems of poor health, injury, illness, disease, disorder, and premature death due to harms caused by social systems, social agents, and social factors. Her longstanding research on the intersection of mental illness, criminal responsibility, and the law, dates back to her award-winning 2005 doctoral dissertation on the science and medicalization of criminality and deviance in Western society. Her theory of psycentrism was further applied to study the legal basis and finding of “not criminally responsible on account of a mental disorder” (NCRMD) relating to a grisly murder in 2008 as featured in the 2019 criminology documentary, “The Cannibal on Bus 1170: Rethinking Moral Panics”. Her scholarship has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and she is the recipient of numerous awards. She has published widely and has presented her work in various venues locally, nationally, and internationally; since 1995 has taught in Sociology, Criminology and Anthropology Departments at several Canadian universities; regularly provides peer review for academic journals, publishers, and funding agencies; sits on several editorial and advisory boards; participates in media interviews; and she is available for expert consultation.
Address: The University of Winnipeg
Department of Sociology
515 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, MB
R3B 2E9

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