Ingrid Waldron

The Netflix documentary There's Something in the Water is based on Dr. Waldron's book and was co-produced by Waldron, actress Ellen Page, Ian Daniel, and Julia Sanderson, and co-directed by Page and Daniel. Dr. Ingrid Waldron, Ph.D. was born in Montreal to Trinidadian parents. She is a sociologist, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health at Dalhousie University, the Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities & Community Health Project (The ENRICH Project), and the Flagship Project Co-Lead of Improving the Health of People of African Descent at Dalhousie's Healthy Populations Institute. Dr. Waldron received a BA in Psychology from McGill University, an MA in Intercultural Education: Race, Ethnicity & Culture from the Institute of Education at the University of London, and a Ph.D. in Sociology & Equity Studies in Education from the University of Toronto. She was also a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto focused on the impacts of discrimination on the mental health of Black women in Toronto, their conceptualizations of mental illness and help-seeking, and racism within psychiatric discourse and practice. Her research, teaching, and community leadership and advocacy work in Nova Scotia are examining and addressing the health and mental health impacts of structural inequalities within health and mental health care, child welfare, and the environment in Indigenous, Black, immigrant, and refugee communities. She recently completed a study titled Black Women's Experiences with Mental Illness, Help-Seeking & Coping in the Halifax Regional Municipality: A Study Conducted to Inform NSHA's Nova Scotia Sisterhood Initiative. The findings will be used to inform a new health service for Black women in the HRM. As the Director of the ENRICH Project over the last 8 years, Dr. Waldron has been investigating the socio-economic, political, and health effects of environmental racism in Mi'kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities. The ENRICH Project formed the basis to the creation of the provincial bill An Act to Redress Environmental Racism (Bill 31) in April 2015 and the federal bill a National Strategy to Redress Environmental Racism (Bill C230) in February 2020. Both bills are the first bills to be introduced on environmental racism in the legislature in Canada. The ENRICH Project also formed the basis to Dr. Waldron's first book There's Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, which was published in 2018 by Fernwood Publishing. The book received the 2020 Society for Socialist Studies Errol Sharpe Book Prize and the 2019 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing.