Heidi Rimke

Title: Associate Professor
Phone: 204.786.9101
Office: 5L28
Building: Lockhart Hall
Email: h.rimke@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:

Dr. Heidi Rimke, PhD is an award-winning social science scholar and professor of sociology and criminology, a mentor to many, and a member of multiple editorial boards and research groups. Her areas of interest and expertise include psychopathology and anti-social conduct; death, dying and the afterlife; campus illegalities, crime victimization, and academic criminality, especially in administrative or executive union positions; epigenetics, disability and complex trauma; cyberstalking, harassment, bullying and mobbing behavior; unsafe and unhealthy social spaces (workplaces, schools, unions, and families); the experience and voices of adopted persons with a focus on justice, rights, safety, health and wellbeing; institutional and organizational corruption, non-disclosure agreements and the protection of predators and abusers in publicly-funded systems; the myth of meritocracy and the problem of academic corruption; the social determinants of health and illness; therapeutic culture and self-help; the history of medicine and psychiatry; criminology and the sociology of deviance; mental health and illness; suicide, suicidality and suicidology; as well as theological and medical sociology. She is the creator of, and has developed in different contexts, the sociological theory of ‘psychocentrism’ to analyze the domination of ‘psy’ discourses that have colonized Western societies to the exclusion of wider disciplinary knowledges. The concept of psychocentrism helps highlight the growing problem of pathological politics, iatrogenesis, and other social causes of poor health, injury, illness, disease, deviance, and premature death. Her sociological framework helps address the effects of a criminal or sickening society built on deadly knowledge deficits, dangerous political interests, economic greed, criminal governance, and growing moral and ethical decline. Her scholarship has been published in numerous academic journals, textbooks, reference sets, and edited collections. Her medico-legal work on therapeutic jurisprudence that includes research on the negative community reaction to a judicial finding of “not criminally responsible on account of a mental disorder” (NCRMD) for a grisly cannibalistic murder was released in the criminology documentary, The Cannibal on Bus 1170: Rethinking Moral Panics (2019).

Academia.edu: https://uwinnipeg.academia.edu/HeidiRimke