Assistant Professor

School of Social Work
St. John's College, 2009
Memorial University of Newfoundland

Phone: 709-864-8151
Email: fandersen@mun.ca

Fred Andersen earned his BA, BSW, and MSW from Memorial University and is an Assistant Professor (ABD) at the School of Social Work, Memorial University. Prior to his appointment, Fred was a per course instructor at the School of Social Work for seven years.

Drawing from his experience as a residential school survivor, Fred’s scholarly interests include a self-reflexive gaze which champions the voices of residential school survivors and their successive generations. Fred has a wide ranging local, regional and national community-based and institutional expertise in the areas of HIV/AIDS, addictions and mental health. His practice areas focus on Indigenous contexts in both urban and community populations as an addictions counsellor, mental health consultant and therapist, advocate and activist, and as a community-based researcher.

Fred’s academic and professional interests include Indigenous  community capacity building; Indigenous ways of knowing, Indigenous knowledge translation and mobilization; action outcome co-creation of community-based, community-driven research with, for, and by Indigenous communities; promoting Indigenous communities’ ways of knowing and healing; anti-colonial social work practice including its relevance for Indigenous communities, promotion of equitable partnerships and honouring of traditional knowledge; Indigenous circle pedagogy; team and group work.

He is a doctoral scholar in the School of Social Work; his dissertation explores Indigenization in BSW Social Work Education. More specifically, he examines the way in which social work BSW students and instructors in Atlantic Canadian universities understand the Indigenization of social work education, and how it is integrated in the curricula and reflected in pedagogies in social work classrooms.