Newark, New Brunswick, & Blackwood, NJ
Newark, New Brunswick, & Blackwood, NJ
Newark, New Brunswick, & Blackwood, NJ
Shira Birnbaum is an ethnographer, educational theorist, editor, and psychiatric nurse. She is the author of three academic books and multiple scholarly papers in the areas of child development, education, and mental health nursing. Her first book, Law and Order and School (Temple University Press, 2001) was an ethnography of interpersonal dynamics in an educational program for justice-involved teenagers. It was named a Chicago Humanities Festival “Good Read” in 2004. Her second book, Therapeutic Communication in Mental Health Nursing: Aesthetic and Metaphoric Processes in the Engagement with Challenging Patients (Routledge, 2017), was a series of case studies examining phenomenological aspects of nursing communication with psychiatric inpatients. Drawing from conceptual traditions in philosophy, cognitive linguistics, psychoanalysis and the arts, it was awarded AJN Book of the Year in 2017. Her third and most recent book, Trauma and Resilience in Holocaust Memoir (published in 2020 and re-released in paperback in 2022), was an exploration of the politics of memory. A narrative analysis of the memoirs of child survivors of World War II, it examined trauma and resilience through the perspective of socio-ecological and neuro-developmental theory. Dr. Birnbaum has also published papers on the social determinants of health and the social construction of race and gender in education and clinical practice. She has lectured widely on pedagogy in qualitative research methods, focusing particularly on the question of how nurses acquire interpretive depth in the practice of qualitative inquiry. In addition to her teaching and doctoral advising, Shira provides support for scholarly writing skills development for School of Nursing doctoral students and faculty.
Dr. Birnbaum completed her undergraduate studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she graduated magna cum laude with Distinction in Anthropology. She minored in Biology. She has a Master’s degree from New York University, where she held a national fellowship in science, health, and environmental writing. During her PhD work in Educational Foundations and Policy Studies at Florida State University, she studied the sociology of education and conducted research on the learning needs and experiences of incarcerated women and adolescents. She has also completed several years of post-graduate training in psychoanalytic theory.
Shira Birnbaum teaches qualitative research methods in the Division of Nursing Science. She also teaches a course in scholarly writing.
Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/citations?user=xddkwTcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Orcid ID: 0000-0002-8666-6166
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