Michael Ungar PhD

A novel that sells as few as 800 copies in Canada is considered successful. So you can imagine how pleased I was to hear that my publisher, Pottersfield Press, has sold out of its first printing of 1500 copies of The Social Worker: A Novel. I continue to tour across North America and internationally and am finding response to the novel wonderful. Professors of Social Work are using it in courses on [..] 

I’ve been travelling across Canada and to several countries in Europe and the reaction to The Social Worker has been amazing. Everywhere, there is interest in reading about the work that social workers, child and youth care workers and allied professionals do in child welfare and criminal justice settings. Obviously the novel is hitting a nerve. Just the idea that someone has finally written [..] 

One of the initiatives that we are doing here at Dalhousie is putting together a partnership between the Resilience Research Centre and the Child Soldiers Initiative. Retired General Romeo Dallaire, who served in Rwanda and is author of the bestselling book on his experiences in Rwanda, Shake Hands with the Devil, founded the Child Soldiers Initiative. Dallaire has become a leading advocate for the [..] 

I’ve been challenged to find ways to help my students take the great learning they get in courses on social justice and classes detailing the complex patterns of oppression that people experience because of their race, culture, ethnicity, ability, gender or sexual orientation, and apply what they know during a clinical session with client. It feels like often they fall back to basic questions [..] 

Last November, I was invited to deliver a plenary address at a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels. I was invited by SOS Children’s Villages, who organized the meeting, to speak on resilience and family strengthening. The importance of strengthening families and enhancing their capacity to sustain themselves in order to better care for their children, instead of removing children from [..] 

Hello and welcome to my new website. As well as this being a place to find out who I am and what I’m doing, I’m hoping to blog regularly and share useful information on the topics of parenting and resilience (my specialist subjects). Recently I’ve been traveling all over speaking to various groups and organizations. Over the past few months I’ve been talking in Sweden, Brussels, Norway and [..]