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Purpose – The chapter explores the methodological challenges in doing community-based participatory research (CBPR) in social science investigations with immigrant women experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) in Canada.

Methodology/approach – The methodological comments, observations, and challenges discussed in this chapter result from research funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council, a branch of the Canadian Federal Tri-Council. The research that the authors conducted was both quantitative and qualitative in nature. The sample consisted of three groups of women: (1) immigrant women in Canada >10 years, (2) immigrant women in Canada <10 years, and (3) visible minority women born in Canada.

Findings – The chapter highlights some of the lessons learned in conducting CBPR research in the context of immigrant survivors of IPV. This discussion can be relevant to both academics and non-profit/advocacy agencies interested in pursuing community partnership research on interpersonal violence.

Originality/value – There is a paucity of writings on CBPR research in the social science and the challenges. This chapter reveals the methodological challenges that the researchers experienced in doing CBPR with racialized immigrant women who are survivors of IPV. This discussion can be relevant to both academics and non-profit/advocacy agencies interested in pursuing community partnership research on interpersonal violence.

This paper aims to investigate the discursive ways in which racialization affects the integration process of immigrants in present-day Canada. By drawing on a historical analysis, this paper shows how race continues to be impacted by colonial principles implemented throughout the colonization process and during the formation stages of Canada as a nation. This paper contributes to management and organizational studies by shedding light on the taken-for-granted nature of discursive practices in organizations through problematizing contemporary societal and political engagements with “race”.

This paper draws on critical diversity studies as theoretical framework to problematize a one-dimensional approach to race and diversity. Further, it applies the Foucauldian historical method (Foucault, 1981) to trace the construction of “race” over time and to show its impact on present-day discursive practices.

Through a discursive review of Canada’s past, this paper shows how seemingly non-discriminatory race-related concepts and policies such as “visible minority” contribute to the marginalization of non-white individuals, racializing them. Multiculturalism and neoliberal globalization are identified as further mechanisms in such a racialization process.

This paper illustrates the importance of a historical contextualization to shed light on present workplace discrimination and challenges unproblematic approaches to workplace diversity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of marginalized women in achieving equal pay for work of equal value. The research focuses on Ontario, Canada, as this is a leading jurisdiction globally in implementing legislation on pay equity. It provides an opportunity to understand the lived experiences of women whom scholars have identified as particularly vulnerable in workplaces.

This is a qualitative research study. Twenty-three interviews were conducted with women defined as marginalized. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data.

Three themes resulted from the analysis: early employment experiences, cultural challenges at work and inequities in pay. The authors found that not only do structural and organizational barriers limit the ability of marginalized women to achieve parity in the workplace but there also is a hidden social element that requires further investigation.

The gender pay gap is wider for marginalized women, even after three decades since pay equity legislation was implemented in Ontario. There is a dearth of research on why this is the case. This study adds to the literature by focusing on a broader set of factors, in addition to legislation, that must be considered when focusing on solutions to the gender pay gap.

This pan-Canadian study examines the information practices of STEM-trained immigrant women to Canada as they navigate workfinding and workplace integration. Our study focuses on a population of highly skilled immigrant women from across Canada and uses an information practice lens to examine their lived experiences of migration and labour market integration. As highly trained STEM professionals in pursuit of employment, our participants have specific needs and challenges, and as we explore these, we consider the intersection of their information practices with government policies, settlement services and the hiring practices of STEM employers.

We conducted a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with 74 immigrant women across 13 Canadian provinces and territories to understand the nature of their engagement with employment-seeking in STEM sectors. This article reports the findings related to the settlement and information experiences of the immigrant women as they navigate new information landscapes.

As immigrants, as women and as STEM professionals, the experiences of the 74 participants reflect both marginality and privilege. The reality of their intersectional identities is that these women may not be well-served by broader settlement resources targeting newcomers, but neither are the specific conventions of networking and job-seeking in the STEM sectors in Canada fully apparent or accessible to them. The findings also point to the broader systemic and contextual factors that participants have to navigate and that shape in a major way their workfinding journeys.

The findings of this pan-Canadian study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. Through interviews with these STEM professionals, we highlight the barriers and challenges of an under-studied category of migrants (the highly skilled and “desirable” type of immigrants). We provide a critical discussion of their settlement experiences and expose the idiosyncrasies of a system that claims to value skilled talent while structurally making it very difficult to deliver on its promises to recruit and retain highly qualified personnel. Our findings point to specific aspects of these skilled professionals’ experiences, as well as the broader systemic and contextual factors that shape their workfinding journey.

In the post-industrial economies of large urban centers, redevelopment has become the primary engine of economic growth. Redevelopment projects are designed to encourage investment, attract tourism and bring new residents to the city. This form of city building is driven by a neoliberal urban agenda that embraces privatization, and is controlled by the economic interests of private business. In this chapter, we argue that city building under a neoliberal rubric is also a gendered political process, the outcome of which is the redevelopment of urban space in ways that reflect a masculinist and corporatist view of city life. Moreover, both the form of redevelopment and the process itself function to limit public participation in the life and growth of cities, particularly for women and other marginalized groups. In the first section of this chapter, Gendered spaces of redevelopment, we examine how the results of such a process are made manifest in the built form of Canada's largest city, Toronto, with a population of 2.5 million. The city is experiencing a major process of redevelopment and city building that is evident in a massive wave of condominium construction. We suggest that condominium projects, as a particular form of redevelopment, create privatized spaces and encourage privatized services that articulate neatly with a neoliberal urban agenda.

The chapter explains how and why the Toronto District School Board (TDSB)'s Safe Schools policy has moved from a zero tolerance approach to progressive discipline and prevention and examines the outcomes for racialized students.

The chapter draws on findings from a critical policy analysis of the TDSB's Safe Schools policy cycle and its connections to various provincial policy cycles through a conceptual policy web.

The TDSB's transition from a zero tolerance approach to discipline to a combination of progressive discipline and prevention has arisen from complaints against the board and the government of Ontario filed by Ontario's Human Rights Commission (OHRC), the shooting death of a student in a TDSB high school and changing legislation. Although suspension and expulsions rates have decreased since changes were introduced, the board's discipline policies still appear to have a disproportionately negative impact on racialized students. The board and province's reluctance to collect race-based data in relation to suspensions and expulsions makes it difficult, yet not impossible, to track progress towards equitable policy outcomes.

Adopting a progressive discipline approach to maintaining safe schools can help keep more students in school without compromising school safety. However, Safe Schools policy includes both texts and practices so equitable outcomes are not guaranteed by rewriting formal policy texts.

Gender is a defining feature of informal/precarious work in the twenty-first century, yet studies rarely adopt a gendered lens when examining collective efforts to challenge informality and precarity. This chapter foregrounds the gendered dimensions of informal/precarious workers’ struggles as a crucial starting point for re-theorizing the future of global labor movements. Drawing upon the findings of the volume’s six chapters spanning five countries (the United States, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and India) and two gender-typed sectors (domestic work and construction), this chapter explores how gender is intertwined into informal/precarious workers’ movements, why gender is addressed, and to what end. Across countries and sectors, informal/precarious worker organizations are on the front lines of challenging the multiple forms of gendered inequalities that shape contemporary practices of accumulation and labor regulation. They expose the forgotten reality that class structures not only represent classification struggles around work, but also around social identities, such as gender, race, and migration status. However, these organizing efforts are not fighting to transform the gendered division of labor or embarking on revolutionary struggles to overturn private ownership and liberalized markets. Nonetheless, these struggles are making major transformations in terms of increasing women’s leadership and membership in labor movements and exposing how gender interacts with other ascriptive identities to shape work. They are also radicalizing hegemonic scripts of capitalist accumulation, development, and even gender to attain recognition for female-dominated occupations and reproductive needs for the first time ever. These outcomes are crucial as sources of emancipatory transformations at a time when state and public support for labor and social protection is facing a deep assault stemming from the pressures of transnational production and globalizing markets.

In this chapter, we examine the unique and heightened negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through tracing how the preexisting social conditions of exclusion and precarity in which many disabled people live, effected access to safe, affordable, and accessible housing in Canada. We then illustrate the reverberating impacts housing choices have on how people with disabilities lived, lived well, and how they faced barriers to living well during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using an intersectional livelihoods approach, we analyzed semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 32 diverse people with disabilities, 12 key informant semi-structured interviews, as well as academic and community literature and a social media scan of key disability advocacy organizations in Canada.

Pandemic-related policies in Canada often excluded people with disabilities, either overlooking barriers to access and safety, which exacerbated the already precarious livelihoods of people with disabilities or over-emphasized the usefulness of social adaptions such as work from home. These exclusions had more profound consequences for people with disabilities from historically marginalized groups, as they often faced increased barriers to livelihoods pre-pandemic, and disability- or care-specific policies failed to consider intersectional experiences of discrimination. People with disabilities formed communities of care to meet their needs and those of their loved ones.

To achieve a responsive policy response that addresses the cascading impacts of risk and care, it is necessary for governments to engage, early and often, with people with disabilities, disability leaders and organizations in emergency planning and beyond.

To compare chronic health status, utilization of healthcare services and life satisfaction among immigrant women and their Canadian counterparts.

A secondary analysis of national data from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), 2015–2016 was conducted. The survey data included 109,659 cases. Given the research question, only female cases were selected, which resulted in a final sample of 52,560 cases. Data analysis was conducted using multiple methods, including logistic regression and linear regression.

Recent and established immigrant women were healthier than native-born Canadian women. While the Healthy Immigrant Effect (HIE) was evident among immigrant women, some characteristics related to ethnic origin and/or unhealthy dietary habits may deteriorate immigrant women's health in the long term. Immigrant women and non-immigrant women with chronic illnesses were both more likely to increase their use of the healthcare system. Notably, the present study did not find evidence that immigrant women under-utilized Canada's healthcare system. However, the findings showed that chronic health issues were more likely to decrease women's life satisfaction.

This analysis contributes to the understanding of immigrant women's acculturation by comparing types of chronic illnesses, healthcare visits, and life satisfaction between immigrant women and their Canadian counterparts.

In an era of global economic expansion, the harsh underside of capitalism clearly affects human subjectivities and consciousness.¹ Emotions, which both express and structure subjectivity and consciousness, reflect and manifest the social reality of human life in its various globalized dimensions. My argument in this chapter thus concerns the ways in which the contradictions as the harsh underside of capitalism affect the subjectivities of racial minorities. For this reason, the relationship between emotions and commodity capitalism is an especially pressing concern for the formation and expression of racial identity in the United States today. To understand the social reality of race in the U.S. capitalist system is to take seriously the affects that express and constitute the critical social thought of racial minorities. As African Americanist scholars such as Cornel West (1994, p. 42) have argued, the ideology of unregulated capital in corporate consumerism creates market moralities and market mentalities that “erode civil society.” The critical thought of black Americans, West (1992, p. 42) avers, suffers irreparable damage by images that relentlessly commercialize the so-called good life:These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others – and thereby edge out nonmarket values – love, care, service to others – handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward off self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America.Corporations thus capitalize on civil rights gains while commodifying the activist politics of communities and governmental organizations. In effect, the “status quo” of government that promotes economic justice and civil rights protections is fragmented and replaced by corporate domination and the rule of the free market. Instead of turning to non-commercial avenues of civil society to change oppressive relations of power, Americans opt for consuming social change in a laissez-faire economy that equates individualism and free choice with purchasing merchandise. In her powerful critique of class privilege and consumption-based individualism, Bell Hooks (2000, p. 81) explains how the media's use of race to promote a “shared culture of consumerism” vitiates community values and deflects attention from class antagonism. Such consumerism, Hooks maintains, promotes ambitions for lifestyles of conspicuous consumption and celebrity that renders incoherent and undesirable a democratic sensibility that made civil rights gains for women and minorities possible in the first place (Bell Hooks, 2000, p. 77).