Amy Brown-Bowers

Amy Brown-Bowers is a clinical psychologist and graduate of the PhD program in Clinical Psychology at Ryerson University with primary research interests in critical psychological approaches to understanding health, gender and sexuality.
She completed her PhD in the SHiFt lab under the supervision of Dr. Maria Gurevich. Her dissertation was a critical psychological investigation of couples navigating sexual and relationship changes following prostate cancer treatment. A core component of this research was contextualizing participant narratives within broader sociocultural discourses of ‘normal’ sexuality, ‘successful’ gender performance and ‘healthy’ relationships. She also has an interest in fat studies and in exploring the ways fat bodies are problematized within medical and psychological spaces.

Amy became drawn to critical psychology while working as a freelance journalist (before making a career change and returning to school to study psychology) and has continued to dig into this rich, complex, stimulating, hopeful, brave and expansive approach to psychology since then. She continues to be drawn to thinkers, writers, teachers, and researchers who are rooted in critical psychology. Critical psychology has provided her with tools and resources (e.g., language, research methodology, role-models, mentors, etc.), with which to engage in resistance in professional and personal domains. This has been welcome and life-changing for her as she navigates and continually renegotiates the various roles that she plays in her life. She is particularly curious about how to translate critical psychology into her clinical work – she sees great potential for critical psychology to bring greater resistance, dignity, self-determination, power-sharing, compassion and kindness to psychotherapy.