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Nick J. Mulé, PhD, is a professor in the School of Social Work, cross appointed to the Sexuality Studies Program in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Faculty of Health at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His research interests include the social inclusion/exclusion of LGBTQI populations in social policy and service provision and the degree of their recognition as distinct communities in cultural, systemic, and structural contexts. He also engages in critical analysis of the LGBTQI movement and the development of queer liberation theory. He has co-edited LGBTQ People and Social Work: Intersectional Perspectives (2015); Queering Social Work Education (2016); The Shifting Terrain: Nonprofit Policy Advocacy in Canada (2017); Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope (2018); and directed, wrote and executive produced the feature documentary “QueerEdge: From Gay to Queer Liberation” (2019). He is Project Director of the $2.5 million SSHRC-funded and first national study, “2SLGBTQ+ Poverty in Canada: Improving Livelihood and Social Wellbeing.” A queer activist for many years, Nick is the founder, past chairperson, secretary, and currently member at large of Queer Ontario. In addition, he is a psychotherapist in private practice serving LGBTQI populations in Toronto.
Damilola Adebayo is an Assistant Professor of History at York University. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge (2020). He is a historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria. His research interests are at the intersection of the history of socioeconomic life (including labor, labor unions, and collective bargaining); the history of science and technology (including apprenticeships, as well as vocational and technical education); and the role of international organizations (such as the International Labor Organizations) in the African past.
His article on the influence of the International Labor Organization on labor policy-making in colonial Nigeria recently appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. As a side project, he is currently researching the history of pensions and compassionate gratuities paid to families of deceased African public-sector workers by the British colonial administration in Nigeria.
Greg Albo teaches political economy at the Department of Political Science, York University, Toronto. He is currently co-editor of the Socialist Register. He is also on the editorial boards of Studies in Political Economy, Relay, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Canadian Dimension, The Bullet and Historical Materialism (England). Co-editor of A Different Kind of State: Popular Power and Democratic Administration and author of numerous articles in journals such as Studies in Political Economy, Socialist Register, Canadian Dimension, and Monthly Review.
Professor Albo is also on the executive of the Centre for Social Justice in Toronto. He has lectured in universities across Canada, and also in the US, Japan, Turkey, Columbia, Cuba, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Italy, Britain, Austria, Germany and elsewhere. Professor Albo’s research interests are the political economy of contemporary capitalism, labour market policies in Canada, and democratization. He teaches courses on the foundations of political economy, Canadian political economy, alternatives to capitalism, and democratic administration.
Pat Armstrong is Professor of Sociology and of Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto, and holds a Canada Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institute of Health Research Chair in Health Services. A sociologist in the fields of social policy, women, work and health and social services, she has published widely, authoring or co-authoring such books as Critical to Care: the Invisible Women in Health Services (University of Toronto Press); Wasting Away; The Undermining of Canadian Health Care (Oxford University Press); and The Double Ghetto: Canadian Women and Their Segregated Work (Oxford University Press). Much of her work makes the relationship between paid and unpaid work central to the analysis. She chairs Women and Health Care Reform, a group funded for more than a decade by Health Canada, and is acting co-director of the National Network for Environments and Women’s Health. She is currently director at York of the Ontario Training Centre and has served as both Chair of the Department of Sociology at York and Director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton. In addition, she has served as an expert witness in more than a dozen cases heard before bodies ranging from the Federal Court to federal Human Rights Tribunals on issues related to women’s work, pay equity and women’s rights.
Linda Briskin is Professor Emeritus in the Social Science Department and the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She is currently researching union leadership, strategies for ensuring equity representation inside unions, the impact of austerity measures on union equality programming and bargaining, and worker militancies, with a special focus on on gendering labour militancies, and nurse militancy. A recent project focuses on leadership, feminism and equality in unions in Canada. She has published extensively on these themes, including the widely read book Women Challenging Unions: Feminism, Democracy, and Militancy (University of Toronto Press), which she co-edited with Patricia McDermott. Recent publications include “Nurse Militancy and Strike Action” (Workers of the World - International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts, 2013); “Merit, Individualism and Solidarity: Revisiting the Democratic Deficit in Union Women’s Leadership” in Leaders, Leadership and Change in Trade Unions (Routledge, 2012); and “Union Renewal, Post-Heroic Leadership and Women’s Organizing: Crossing Discourses, Reframing Debates” (Labor Studies Journal, 2011). Forthcoming publications include “Austerity, Union Policy and Gender Equality Bargaining” (Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research); and “Strategies to Support Equality Bargaining Inside Unions: Representational Democracy and Representational Justice” (for the special Issue on “Rethinking Equality Bargaining” of the Journal of Industrial Relations, April 2014). For more information on her research, visit her website.
John Carlaw teaches in the Political Science Department at Glendon College as a contract faculty member and is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ryerson University under its Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration Program, where he co-leads the Politics and Narratives of Migration research theme.
His work explores the politics and social relations of citizenship, immigration and refugee policy where he has also been active in civil society organizations.
John holds a PhD from the Department of Political Science, York University. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Project Lead of York University's Syria Response and Refugee Initiative, a refugee sponsorship and education initiative at York’s Centre for Refugee Studies. John turned to migration and refugee studies after several years of studying, working and engaging in solidarity and education efforts in the areas of democracy, human rights and political economy in Latin America, including working with the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) and Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC), York University.
His work has appeared in The Conversation, the Journal of Canadian Studies, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ The Harper Record 2008-1015 and the Ethnic Aisle.
Dr. Soma Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, York University. Soma is broadly interested in migration and mobility, sovereignty and borders, and their implications for contemporary Western nation building. Her doctoral research looked at the labour market integration of skilled immigrants, and how through the notion/practice of skill-training, a specific 'immigrant' subject distinct from Canadian 'nationals' emerged in the decades following liberalization. She is currently working on a manuscript based on her doctoral research titled Skills to Build the Nation, which aims to open up a space for dialogue on the high skilled labour market as a major site for the exercise of exclusionary nationalism in Canada. Soma’s current research also explores study-migration pathways and the ‘entanglement’ of immigration, antiracist politics and Indigenous sovereignty in contemporary Canada. See other scholarly and publishing details: http://people.laps.yorku.ca/people.nsf/researcherprofile?readform&shortname=schat
John Clarke worked for 28 years as an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), mobilizing poor and homeless people to resist poverty and austerity. In 2019, he took the position of Packer Visitor in Social Justice at York University.
Victoria Daniel is an Assistant Professor in the School of Administrative Studies at York University. Victoria earned her Ph.D. and MSc in Management (OB/HRM) from the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research examines how contemporary employees navigate the work-life interface as well as understanding barriers to workplace equity and inclusion, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of gender and nonwork obstacles people may face in their career advancement. She is also broadly interested in research methods and measurement for the behavioural sciences, as a mixed methods researcher specializing in both quantitative and qualitative approaches.
Raju J Das teaches in the Geography Department at York. His work on labour is at two levels. At a more general level, it concerns labour, accumulation and class struggle, focusing on the dual modes of subsumption of labour under capital, and free-unfree character of labour. He is also interested in state-labour relations, and
materialist-dialectical critique of academic approaches to labour agency. At a more specific level, he conducts research on labour in the development context (in peripheral-capitalist societies such as India). In this research: he examines the operation of (rural) labor markets, and the ways in which they are contested; relation between labour and technology including in its bio-chemical and mechanical forms; poverty of laboring families in relation to welfare policies; everyday lives of labour, including norms of reciprocity (social capital) in labor-dominated places, and resistance of proletarian and semi-proletarian wage-earners to class exploitation and social oppression. His 2006-2010 SSHRC project was on labour and neoliberal capitalism, in which the super-exploitation of male and female labour and child labour in export-oriented production was unpacked, and the concept of 'labour metabolic rift' was advanced.His work on labour is published in places such as: /Review of Radical Political Economics/ /Dialectical Anthropology,/ /Geoforum,/ /International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,/ /Journal of Contemporary Asia,/ /Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers/, and /Human Geography: A new radical journal/. Some of the more conceptual issues involving labour are also in his '/A Contribution to the Critique of Contemporary Capitalism: Theoretical and International Perspectives/' (Nova, New York, 2014) and will appear in a book manuscript (for Brill) tentatively entitled /Class theory for a skeptical world/.
David Doorey is Associate Professor in the School of Human Resources Management and Academic Director of Osgoode Hall Law School’s executive LLM Program in Labour and Employment Law. He has degrees in law and industrial relations from the University of Toronto (B.A., M.I.R.), the London School of Economics (LLM), and Osgoode Hall Law School (LL.B., Ph.D). He is called to the Bars of Ontario and British Columbia, and practiced labour and employment law in both provinces prior to returning to academic life. His research interests include labour and employment law, legal theory, regulatory theory, and labour practices governance within global supply chains. Recent publications include “Graduated Freedom of Association: Worker Voice After the Wagner Model,” Queen's Law Journal (2013); “A Model of Responsive Workplace Law,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal (2012); and “The Transparent Supply Chain: From Resistance to Implementation at Nike and Levi-Strauss,” Journal of Business Ethics (2011). He is also the author of the award-winning blog, The Law of Work and a frequent commentator in the media and on Twitter.
Carlo Fanelli is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Work and Labour Studies in the Department of Social Science and appointed to the Graduate Program in Sociology at York University. His work is interdisciplinary and broadly comparative. In particular, he is interested in work and labour market restructuring, public policy, political economy and social inequality. His current work revolves around two projects. The first explores how urban austerity has impacted public services and labour-management relations in Canadian cities and how these experiences differ and/or share parallels with international examples. The second investigates the emergence of living wage movements in Canadian and international contexts. He is also conducting research on unpaid internships, ‘gig’ work and labour-community coalitions. Since 2009, he has also been editor-in-chief of Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research published by Athabasca University Press.
Fay Faraday is a social justice lawyer, strategic adviser, policy consultant and academic whose work focuses on constitutional law/Charter of Rights and Freedoms, human rights, labour and employment law, pay equity, employment equity, transnational migrant workers’ rights, and public interest litigation. She is the founder of Faraday Law an independent social justice law and strategic consulting practice in Toronto. Fay is also an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School where she teaches in the areas of social and economic justice, labour, employment, transnational labour migration, human rights, ethical lawyering, appellate advocacy, and social justice and political activism. As an Innovation Fellow with the Metcalf Foundation, Fay has published three landmark reports on migrant worker rights in Canada. She has published extensively on constitutional law, labour and human rights.
Gilberto Fernandes is a Visiting Professor in the Department of History at York University. His research on the history of Portuguese diasporic communities in Canada and the United States has been published in various journal articles, and in his book This Pilgrim Nation: The Making of the Portuguese Diaspora in Postwar North America (University of Toronto Press, 2019). Since 2018, his research has focused on the history and present-day realities of immigrant and Indigenous construction workers, and their craft unions in the GTA, Ontario, and Nunavut. In 2021, he authored the report "In(diginize) Solidarity: Indigenous Workers and Construction Unions in the Greater Toronto Area," in partnership with a building trade union and a local nonprofit community organization. Fernandes is also a prolific public historian, with multiple credits in digital history, oral history, exhibit curation, documentary filmmaking, and community archives facilitation – including the Portuguese Canadian History Project. He received the 2019 Lieutenant Governor's Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation for his multidimensional public history project City Builders: A History of Immigrant Construction Workers in Postwar Toronto. For more on his research and public history work, visit his website.
Luin Goldring is a Professor of Sociology at York University. Her research examines the intersections of precarious work and precarious legal status trajectories, and considers how these are assembled and contribute to ongoing and temporally dynamic differential inclusion and social inequality. Recent publications have appeared in The Conversation; Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies; Citizenship Studies; and the Journal of Social Research Methodology. She is a participant in the Canadian node of the network Im(Mobilities) in the Americas and co-editor of Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship (UBC 2013).
Mark Joseph Goodman teaches in the Department of Sociology at York University with a specialization in the area of Racialization and the Law. His research focuses on slavery and post-slavery labour regimes and their racialized successors on a comparative basis, and includes, among major cases, Brazil, Mexico, Jamaica, the United States, and Canada. He is working on a book that looks at the intersection of coerced labour practices, racial violence, and imperial strategy in the US. A sample of his approach can be found in "Capitalist discipline. Review of Plantation kingdom: The American South and its global commodities, by Richard Follett, Sven Beckert, Peter Coclanis, and Barbara Hahn (2016), and Slavery’s capitalism: A new history of American economic development, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (2016)." Reviews in American History 46: 391-398 (2018).
Andil Gosine’s writing, research and artistic practice explore imbricated iterations of ecology, desire and power, and reference personal experiences growing up in Trinidad and Tobago and Canada, and living in the USA, UK and France, and their social histories. An Associate Professor at York University, where he teaches courses in contemporary Cultural Studies, Dr. Gosine’s research has been published in several journals including Small Axe, Sexualities, Topia Journal of Cultural Studies, Social Justice, Development, Canadian Woman Studies and Alternatives, and he edited the groundbreaking “Sexualities” edition of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. He is also author of the monographs Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction, Rescue and Real Love: Same-sex desire in international development and Sex for pleasure, and a contributor to the scholarly anthologies Queer Ecologies, Queer Online, Queer Youth Cultures, Queerly Canadian, Sex, Power and Taboo and Global Governance and Sexual Rights. Dr. Gosine’s arts practice began in 2011 and his video, photography, installation and performance work has been presented at Queens Museum, the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Jamaica Performing Arts Center and MixNYC in New York, at O’Born Contemporary, REEL Asian, Inside Out International Film Festival, the Art Gallery of York University, Rhubarb/Buddies in Bad Times and Videofag in Toronto, Supernova in Washington DC and at Queer City Cinema in Regina. Reviews by and/or about him have appeared in Art in America, Of Note and ARC.
Duygu Biricik Gulseren completed her PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Saint Mary's University. Her research focuses on healthy and safe work (e.g., leading healthy workplaces, chronic pain at work, work-life-health interface) and leadership (e.g., transformational leadership, abusive supervision, leadership development). Duygu studies these topics at the individual, team, and organizational levels using a wide range of methodologies including experiments, interventions, qualitative, and quantitative methods (e.g., longitudinal/multilevel studies, large-scale surveys). She published a number of research articles and book chapters on these topics.
Being guided by the experiential teaching and learning philosophy, Duygu has designed and delivered several courses including occupational health psychology, organizational behaviour and human resource management, organizational development, industrial/organizational psychology, research methods and statistics, and staffing and selection. She is very much interested in working with graduate and undergraduate students.
Prior to York University, Duygu worked as a Sr. Research Associate at Haskayne School of Business, taught at Haskayne School of Business, Saint Mary's University and Sobey School of Business, and worked as a human resources consultant. She has a BSc. degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering and an MA degree in Social and Organizational Psychology from Koç University.
Alison Harvey is Assistant Professor in Communications at Glendon College, York University. Her research and teaching focuses on issues of inclusivity and accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on gender and labour in digital games. She is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context (2015, Routledge) and Feminist Media Studies (2019, Polity). Her work has also appeared in a range of interdisciplinary journals, including Games & Culture, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Information, Communication & Society, Social Media & Society, and Studies in Social Justice.
Shamette Hepburn is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at York University. She holds a PhD in Social Justice Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. She received her MSW at York University and MSc in Educational Leadership from Central Connecticut State University. Her research attends to the global life course and visual representations of the everyday life geographies of diasporic older adults. Her current research is focused on the experiences of retired transmigrants at the distal end of the migratory life course. She teaches courses focused on social work practice and research at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
Ling Jiang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Technology, York University. She received her PhD in Information Systems (IS) from the College of Business at City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on user behaviors in online labor markets and user-generated content (UGC) platforms. In particular, her research explores the impacts of IT on the changing nature of work and online laborers. Her research has appeared in leading IS journals including Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) and Internet Research, as well as in top-tier communication journal New Media and Society (NMS). She also presented her research at several IS conferences.
Dr. Hannah Johnston is an Assistant Professor in the School of Human Resources Management where her research focuses on the digitalization of work. Prior to joining York, Hannah was a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University in Boston. She has also worked professionally at the International Labour Organization and with trade unions and workers' organizations on issues related to collective organizing, algorithmic management, and technological change. Hannah has a longstanding interest in the platform economy and is a collaborator with Oxford University’s Fairwork Project. Her recent publications can be found in journals including ILR Review, Work and Occupations, and the International Labour Review.
Jan Kainer is Associate Professor at York University in the Work & Labour Studies Program in the Department of Social Science and in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Her research and publications are in the area of gender and work with particular focus on equity and women’s participation in organized labour. She has published on pay equity, food retail, nurse risk, women in the legal profession, and youth internships. She is currently involved in the CURA SSHRC grant Work in a Warming World in which she is researching the impact of climate change on work in the food sector. Publications include “Exploring risk in professional nursing practice: an analysis of work refusal and professional risk” (with Barbara Beardwood) in Nursing Inquiry (2013); “Gendering Union Renewal: Women’s Contributions to Labour Revitalization” in J. Foley and P. Baker (eds.), Unions, Equity and the Path to Union Renewal (UBC Press, 2009); “Learning Social Justice? Assessing the Benefits of Work Study Placements for Marginalized Students in Post-Secondary Education” in D. Livingston, K.Mirchandani and P. Sawchuk (eds.), The Future of Lifelong Learning and Work: Critical Perspectives (Sense Publishers, 2008); and Cashing In on Pay Equity? Supermarket Restructuring and Gender Equality in Employment (Canadian Scholars' Press, 2002).
My research revolves around questions of migration and labour, within broader contexts of uneven economic geographies and class-based inequalities. I have a longstanding commitment to research in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and have also worked extensively with the Filipino community in Canada. My recent research has included projects focused on inter-generational class mobility among Filipino youth in Canada; Filipino immigrant integration in Canada, especially in the context of the caregiver program; and the ways in which transnational ties between Canada and the Philippines foster economic and political solidarities between both contexts. My research and mobilization work has usually been in collaboration with community organizations – including the development of Filipino-centric curriculum with a school board in Toronto, and engaging in ‘data liberation’ for community agencies working on immigrant employment issues. A new research project (in collaboration with Peter Vandergeest and Melissa Marshke) draws upon my broader interests in how global production networks shape inequality and labour processes. Specifically, we will be examining the ways in which global seafood supply chains structure the working conditions of migrant labour in the fishing fleets of East and Southeast Asia.
Dr. Christopher Kyriakides holds the Canada Research Chair in Socially Engaged Research in Race and Racialization and is an Associate Professor in Sociology at York University, Canada. He is a former post-doctoral research fellow of the Centre for Research in Racism, Ethnicity and Nationalism, University of Glasgow and of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol. He is an affiliate scholar with the Centre for the Study of Immigration, Population and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine and with York’s Centre for Refugee Studies.
As Canada Research Chair Kyriakides' “Racialized Reception Contexts” program focuses on configurations of racialization in relation to the meaning of East/West, South/North, and articulations of racism and nationalism in the reception of refugees in Europe, North America and the Middle East. His research is guided by the understanding that racialization (particularly in light of the post-9/11 “war on terror”) works with the historical conditions of racism specific to a given national formation, but in a dynamic global context. The initial five-country analysis of Canada, the United States, Italy, Greece and Jordan, will examine the extent to which policy instruments and media discourse related to the global refugee crisis negatively impacts racialized communities in each reception context.
Robert Latham is Professor in the Department of Politics at York University. He has published widely on topics including political economy, working class mobilization, security, digital activism, technologies of border surveillance, critical theories of sovereignty, transnational relations, migration, and multiculturalism. He is interested in political economy, borders, sovereignty, radical political alternatives, working class politics, environmental studies, politics of new media, critical theories of conflict, transnational politics, governance, intervention // Marxism, Anarchism, spatial politics, democracy, political ecology, knowledge, citizenship and post-nationality, temporality, international sociology and IR, imperialism and empire, state theory, and liberalism. He is co-organizer of Marxist Studies in Global and Asian Perspectives at York University. Among his recent work is the co-edited volume, Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left Recasting Leftist Imagination.
Audrey Laurin-Lamothe holds a PhD in Sociology (2017, Université du Québec à Montréal). Her thesis created a portrait of the economic elite in Quebec in the context of increased firm financialization, through an analysis of individual profiles, compensation and social networks. Her research program is informed by the understanding that financialization is a driving force of economic transformation and more broadly, profoundly influences relationships among households, organizations and the State. Her previous academic contributions analyzed gender-based fiscal policies, public indebtedness, and wages’ stagnation in Canada.
Dr. Gillian McGillivray’s interest in commodities (especially sugar) and micro-history combined with her gravitation toward early XXth century developments—war, boom, and bust at the global level and nationalism, populism, and revolution at the local level—motivated her book, “Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State-Formation in Cuba, 1868-1958” (Duke Univ, 2009) and her new book project “Sugar and Power in Brazil, 1880-1965.” She is particularly interested in the relationships between (rural) cane-field workers and industrial sugar factory workers across the nations of Latin America, and in populism and worker rights in rural zones. Her most recent publication is a co-authored chapter called "Real Labor Movements, Imagined Revolutions: The Northeastern Brazilian Sugar Zone through US Eyes, 1955-1964," in the edited volume she co-edited with Thomas D. Rogers, Alexandre Fortes, and Fernando Teixeira da Silva "The Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United States" (Lexington Books, January 2023).
Marcello Musto is Professor of Sociology at York University (Toronto – Canada). His major writings comprise Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Bloomsbury, 2018); and The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford University Press, 2020). Among his edited books there are Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (Routledge, 2008); Marx for Today (Routledge 2012); Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Bloomsbury, 2014); Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, (Routledge, 2019); The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); and Rethinking Alternatives with Marx: Economy, Ecology and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
His writings – available at www.marcellomusto.org – have been published worldwide in twenty-five languages. Musto is also the editor of the book series Marx, Engels, Marxisms (Palgrave Macmillan) and Critiques and Alternatives to Capitalism (Routledge).
Terry Maley is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at York University. His research interests lie in the areas of Critical Theory (Marcuse and Adorno), radical democratic theory (Sheldon Wolin), twentieth century political and social thought (Max Weber, Hannah Arendt), Marx and 20th century Marxism, theories of the state and neoliberalism. Global democratic, ecological, social and protest movements are also key areas of interest. He has also taught and written about Canadian political economy and public policy in a global context, with a focus on the transformative democratic potential of alternative, participatory community–based budget processes.
Maura Matesic is an associate librarian and adjunct professor at York University. Maura is currently teaching courses in research methodologies in the Law and Society program at York, and has published her work in a variety of journals including Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, the Charleston Adviser, and College & Undergraduate Libraries. Her current research centers on workplace bullying in Canadian academic libraries. She is particularly interested in exploring institutional structures that contribute to negative work environments; that enable bullying behaviours; and that prevent employees from seeking timely remedies through personal advocacy, grievance, and union activity.
Dr. Farah N. Mawani is an Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University and a social and psychiatric epidemiologist at MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto. Her ground-breaking global research, teaching, and leadership focus on reducing social and health inequities. Dr. Mawani brings her years of experience embedded in applied research, policy, and community environments to leading award-winning research, teaching, and service that redresses scientific racism and the exclusion of racialized groups. She does so by advancing inclusive research approaches, conceptualization, research questions, and solutions. Her research aims to understand and address systemic racism and discrimination, including social exclusion created by the dynamic interaction of migration, labour, social protection, and COVID-19 mitigation policies. She is currently leading the longitudinal quantitative component of the CIHR-funded COVID-19 and Precarious Employment (COPE) mixed-methods study. She recently published "COVID-19 Economic Response and Recovery: A Rapid Scoping Review" (International Journal of Health Services 2021), that informed the United Nations’ Research Roadmap for the COVID-19 Recovery, guiding the UN, governments, funding agencies, and research institutions on increasing equity in the COVID-19 recovery. Forthcoming publications include "Opportunity costs: Underemployment, a determinant of mental health inequities between immigrant and Canadian-born labour force participants."
Katherine Nastovski is an Assistant Professor (CLA) in Work and Labour Studies in the Department of Social Science at York University. Her research in the field of Global Labour Studies bridges the fields of the Sociology of Work, Transnational Sociology and Labour Geography to examine possibilities for transnational labour solidarity and coordination. Rooted in her years as a union activist and international labour solidarity organizer, Katherine’s community-engaged research agenda aims to build the field of Global Labour Studies in Canada in ways that support the efforts of labour organizers and activists. Katherine is currently co-editing a special issue of Global Labour Journal on multi-scalar approaches to labour transnationalism and is completing a manuscript entitled Transnational Horizons: Workers in Canada Enter the Global Sphere (under contract with the University of Toronto Press).
Viviana Patroni is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University and Coordinator of the International Development Studies Program. Her work has focused on the experience of development in Latin American, the changing nature of state-labour relations under neoliberalism and the emergence of new forms of unionism in Argentina. She is currently also the co-director of a Canadian-funded project of activities aimed at supporting the development of a Latin American network for human rights education and research.
Kelly Pike is Assistant Professor of Industrial Relations in the School of Human Resources Management, and part-time consultant for the International Labour Organization. Kelly earned a PhD in Industrial and Labour Relations from Cornell University. She specializes in the role of worker voice and participation in the regulation of international labour standards, with a particular focus on the global garment industry in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her research contributes to the literature on regulating labour in global value chains. She has published peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, as well as reports and discussion papers for the ILO. Prior to her current appointment in the School of HRM, Kelly was a CLA in Work and Labour Studies at York. She currently teaches courses in Industrial Relations and Negotiations.
Dennis Pilon is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Political Science at York University. His current research deals with unravelling the social struggles and conflict that have given contemporary democracy its shape, both good and bad. One line of research involves an historical analysis of the emergence of democratic institutions, highlighting the key role of organized labour and left/labour parties. Another examines elections as particular spaces of social and political conflict, informed and shaped by the larger capitalist context within which they occur. Finally, his research is exploring the 'electoral subaltern' via an ethnographic approach to interviewing non-participants in Canadian elections, who disproportionately are from the ranks of the poor and working class. His recent publications include Wrestling With Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the 20th Century West (University of Toronto Press, 2013).
Prof. Preston is a social geographer currently investigating public debates concerning the impact of immigration on the landscapes of Canadian and Australian cities, immigrant women’s integration in urban labor markets, and the ways transnational migration affects citizenship in Canadian cities.
Sara Slinn joined the Osgoode faculty in 2007, after five years at Queen’s Faculty of Law. Professor Slinn’s research interests are in the areas of labour and employment law, focusing on different approaches and impediments to collective employee representation, and the intersection of Charter rights and labour law. Reflecting her interdisciplinary graduate work, including a PhD in Industrial Relations from the University of Toronto, Professor Slinn’s research is interdisciplinary and uses empirical methods of analysis. She has also practised labour and employment law with both the British Columbia Labour Relations Board and a private law firm in Vancouver.Research Interests: Labour Law, Employment Law, Industrial Relations, Constitutional Law, Contracts
Gabrielle Slowey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at York University and is a member of the graduate programs in Politics and Socio-Legal Studies. She is the former Director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York (2015-2021) and she was the inaugural Fulbright Chair in Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College (USA) and a York-Massey Fellow. Her research focuses on the political economy of land claims, treaties, and self-government, especially across the north/Arctic and in areas where resource extraction takes place. Her work considers questions of community health, environmental security, climate change and Indigenous rights in these contexts. Her approach is very much community-based and community-driven research. Her most recent project looks at labour in the Canadian Arctic and economic reconciliation. It draws upon broader theoretical concerns of colonialism, reconciliation, staples, and democracy. She is the author of numerous publications, including Navigating Neoliberalism: Self-Determination and the Mikisew Cree First Nation.
Jennifer Stephen specializes in 20th-century Canadian social, political and economic history and comparative welfare state history.
Mark P. Thomas is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology. He is former Director of the Global Labour Research Centre at York and has been a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University, and a Visiting Researcher at Institut de Recherches Sociologiques, Université de Genève. Current areas of research include: work, time, and new technologies; labour, austerity, and populism in urban North America; and the enforcement of employment standards legislation in Canada. Thomas is the author of Regulating Flexibility: The Political Economy of Employment Standards (McGill-Queens, 2009), co-author of Work and Labour in Canada: Critical Issues, 3rd Edition (Canadian Scholars Press, 2017) and Closing the Employment Standards Enforcement Gap: Improving Protections for People in Precarious Jobs (University of Toronto Press, 2020), and co-editor of several volumes including Change and Continuity: Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019) and Power and Everyday Practices, 2nd Edition (University of Toronto Press, 2019). His work has also been published in journals including Antipode, Economic & Industrial Democracy, Journal of Industrial Relations, Labor Studies Journal, Labour/Le Travail, Studies in Political Economy, and Work, Employment & Society.
Eric Tucker has been a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto since 1981. He has degrees from Columbia, Yale and York University. He has published extensively on labour and employment law and occupational health and safety regulation and on legal history. He is the author of Administering Danger in the Workplace (1990) and co-author of Labour before the Law (2001) and Self-Employed Workers Organize (2005). He is also the editor of Working Disasters: The Politics of Recognition and Response (2006) and co-editor of Work on Trial: Canadian Labour Law Struggles (2010), Property on Trial: Canadian Property Law Cases in Context (2012) and Constitutional Labour Rights in Canada: Farm Workers and the Fraser Case (2012).
Steven Tufts is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Geography at York University. He has degrees from McGill (BAHons), Queen's (MA) and York (PhD) Universities. His research interests are related to the geographies of work, workers and organized labour. His current projects involve the use of strategic research by labour unions and labour union renewal in Canada, the integration of immigrants in urban labour markets, labour market adjustment in the hospitality sector, the impact of climate change on workers and workplaces, and the intersection between labour and populism. He has contributed to a number of edited collections and published articles in journals such as Geoforum, Antipode and Environment and Planning A.
Ethel Tungohan is an incoming assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Social Science. Her research looks at migrant labor, specifically assessing migrant activism. Her forthcoming book, "From the Politics of Everyday Resistance to the Politics from Below," which will be published by the University of Illinois Press, won the 2014 National Women's Studies Association First Book Prize. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, and Canadian Ethnic Studies. She is also one of the editors of "Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility," which was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2012. She is the founder of Canadians for an Inclusive Canada and is actively involved in grassroots migrant organizations such as Gabriela-Ontario and Migrante-Canada.
Leah F. Vosko is Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Gender and Work at York University. Professor Vosko is the author of Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship (University of Toronto Press, 2000), Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment (Oxford University Press, 2010) and co-author of Self-Employed Workers Organize: Law, Policy, and Unions (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005). She is the editor and co-editor of six books including Liberating Temporariness?: Migration, Work and Citizenship in an Age of Insecurity (McGill-Queen's University Press: 2014). She has also overseen collaborative Gender and Work Database and Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database projects since 2001.
Jeffery R. Webber is a political economist with research interests in the politics of class and social oppression, Latin America, Marxism, social theory, the history of the Left, international development, capitalism and nature, imperialism, and social movements. He is author or co-author of five books – Impasse of the Latin America Left, with Franck Gaudichaud and Massimo Modonesi (forthcoming, 2022); The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left (2017); Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America, with Todd Gordon (2016); Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (2012); and From Rebellion to Reform: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales (2011). He is also the co-editor of two books – Crisis and Contradiction: Marxist Perspectives on Latin America in the Global Political Economy, with Susan Spronk (2015); and The New Latin American Left: Cracks in the Empire, with Barry Carr (2013). Before coming to York Webber taught at Goldsmiths, University of London, Queen Mary University of London, and the University of Regina. He has lectured across Europe, North America, and Latin America, and sits on the editorial board of Historical Materialism.
Cynthia Wright is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Trained as an historian, her broad interests in labour research include: migration and the historical production of “illegality”; migrant and no border movements; labour, working-class and radical history; labour internationalisms past and present; revitalization of labour and working-class movements; feminist political economy and intersectionality. Her recent articles have appeared in journals such as International Journal of Migration and Border Studies; Social Justice; and Refuge. She has contributed to numerous anthologies including Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt (University of Toronto Press, 2013). She is the co-editor (with Luis René Fernandez Tabío and Lana Wylie) of Other Diplomacies: Other Ties: Cuba and Canada in the Shadow of the US (University of Toronto Press, 2018).
Dr. Zhang has been conducting multilingual, multi-sited research that explores the intersections of gender, race, labour migration, body politics, and cultural policy in global creative industries. Her interdisciplinary approaches to research and teaching are informed by intersectional feminist perspectives, postcolonial theories, and international political economy analyses. Before joining York, she was a Mitacs Elevate Postdoctoral Researcher at Concordia University, where she conducted a research project on gendered and racial barriers in film production education. Previously, she also held postdoctoral fellowships at Université de Montréal and Queen’s University. Dr. Zhang’s first major project is an ethnographic and historical study of artisanal labour in Tibetan capital city Lhasa, where handmade wool carpets are marketed as indigenous cultural exports. Her second project uses “acrobatics” as an entry point to investigate the body as both a subject of labour and a cultural medium in the processes of nation-state building, international diplomacy, and cultural trade. These projects have produced multiple presentations, book chapters, and publications in academic journals, such as The Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture, The Journal of International Labor and Working-Class History, The International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Feminist Media Studies.
Diao Abdoukhadre is an Associate Professor in International Human Resources Management & Global Organizational Behavior with more than sixteen years of job experience in Senior Human Resources Management in the Senegalese Fisheries and Maritime Economics Ministry. He has a PhD in Business Administration from Yeungnam University in South Korea (KGSP Award 2008). Professor Abdoukhadre's teaching and research interests are: international business, international HRM, global organizational behaviour, international business strategies, socio-cultural understandings if international business success, integration and inclusion of global migrant workers, inclusion/diversity in the global workplace, globalization/business, migration/employment, gender and equality in work, cross-cultural management, global leadership, global business trade and intercultural competencies, business and society, CSR, and economic intelligence. He has goal to highlight and to understand the trends shaping Human Resources Management and the need of global-minded leaders for innovative and effective workplace management for successful business and society which are very important in this 21st century.
Dr. Adebisi teaches Sociology at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. He has had over twenty-five years teaching and research experience at the University, specializing in Industrial Sociology/Industrial Relations. However, his writing and research experience is eclectic, covering such areas as development, social and industrial psychology, politics, gender, social research and urbanization.
Sahar Ahadi is a Work Integrated Learning Supervisor and Instructor at Cestar College. She is the former Research Associate at the Ted Rogers Leadership Center at Ryerson University. She holds a PhD in Human Resource Development with major focus on the future of work. She spent two years as a Postdoc Research Fellow at the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is human resource and organizational behaviour professional with an extensive background in designing, conducting, and evaluating training and development programs for organizations using structured on-the-job training, on-line training, and blended learning in Canada, USA, Iran, and Malaysia. Sahar has collaborated with the Newcomer Students Association as a VP community Engagement and Outreach designing a forum app for immigrant and refugees students to help them find jobs in the Canadian context while tracking their wellbeing and mental health through their transition.
Simon Black is an Assistant Professor of Labour Studies at Brock University. His research employs a feminist political economy approach to the study of work and labour in urban, national, and transnational contexts and explores how race, class, gender, citizenship/migration shape social reproduction and the organization of paid and unpaid work. His current research interests include community unionism and ‘alt-labour’ and domestic worker organizing and resistance. He is the author of Social Reproduction and the City: Welfare, Childcare, and Resistance in Neoliberal New York (University of Georgia Press 2020). As a scholar-activist, Simon writes and speaks on work, inequality, social justice and social movements. Twitter: @_SimonBlack
Dr. Jenny Carson- Department of History, Ryerson. Dr. Carson studies twentieth century American women’s labour history with a particular focus on the history of service work and women’s organizing in the United States. Her work has appeared in Labor Studies Journal, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society, and the Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History. Her article “‘Taking on Corporate Bullies’: Cintas, Laundry Workers, and Organizing in the 1930s and Twenty-First Century,” published in Labor Studies Journal (2010) was chosen by the journal as the best article of 2010. Her book manuscript, ‘It was up to All of us to Fight’: Women, Work, and Resistance in the Laundry Industry, under contract with the University of Illinois Press, provides the first book-length examination of laundry work and laundry worker organizing in the United States. As well as researching the historical roots of worker mobilizations, Dr. Carson currently is part of the five-year SSHRC-funded Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario project, which is investigating how low-wage workers and their allies are responding collectively to the growth of precarious employment in the 21st century. In 2010, Dr. Carson won the Dean’s Teaching Award, which recognizes continuing teaching excellence and achievement in instruction, as well as direct engagement of students. She also is a member of the graduate faculty.
Jennifer Chun- Department of Sociology University of Toronto- Scarborough. Dr Chun's research interests are broadly animated by questions about the dynamics of power, inequality and social change under global capitalism. In particular, she explores how people experience and make sense of the social, economic and political transformations associated with employment precarity and the intensification of new and existing social inequalities along gender, race, class and migration status. Her book, Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009) won the ASA Race, Gender and Class Section's 2012 Distinguished Book Award (co-winner). Her current major research project examines the affective and emotional politics of organizing immigrant women workers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Vancouver. She is involved in several collaborative research projects, including a multi-country comparison of alternative models of collective organizing by workers in informal and precarious jobs; gender, migration and care worker organizing; employment standards enforcement gaps in Ontario; and protest cultures in South Korea. She is the past president (2010-14) of the Research Committee on Labour Movements (RC44) of the International Sociological Association. She is the director of the Centre for the Study of Korea housed at the Asian Institute in the Munk School of Global Affairs.
Nicole Cohen is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), which received the 2017 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association, and with Greig de Peuter, New Media Unions: Organizing Digital Journalists (Routledge, 2020). Nicole researches in the area of political economy of communication, specifically work and labour in the media and cultural industries, media and cultural worker organizing, and journalism (new research focuses on gender, race, and work in digital journalism) and collaborates on the SSHRC-funded Cultural Workers Organize project. Nicole was the first editor of J-Source.ca‘s Work and Labour section and is on the advisory board of the Canadian Intern Association. Her academic research has been published internationally in books, journals, and magazines.
Thomas Collombat is Assistant Professor in Social Sciences at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and Political Economy from Carleton University. His research focuses on labour internationalism in the Americas, the socio-political analysis of the Québec labour movement, and union democracy in a comparative approach, particularly between North America and Western Europe.
Dr. Cynthia Cranford is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Professor Cynthia Cranford studies inequalities of gender, work and migration, and collective efforts to resist them. She has analyzed this nexus of inequalities and resistance through both in-depth, case studies of precarious migrant workers, like janitors in Los Angeles and temporary agency workers in Toronto, and analyses of insecure labour markets in Canada and the U.S. Her recent research compares the social organization of in-home personal care and support – the bodywork, emotion-work and housework that allows elderly, chronically ill and disabled people to live at home – across different contexts. Dr. Cranford’s book, Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances (2020, Cornell University Press) analyzes the dynamics that exacerbate, and alleviate, tensions between elderly and disabled people’s quest for flexible services and workers’ pursuit of security.
Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez is an Assistant Professor in Labour Studies and Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Coast Salish/British Columbia. She is a transnational labour scholar and community-labour organizer committed to critical sociology and decolonial theories of knowledge production that centers diverse ways of knowing and precarious workers’ experiences within the margins of the global economy. She is the co-founder of the award wining collective, Justice for Migrant Workers, J4MW that has advocated for the rights and status of migrant farmworkers in Canada for two decades. Her research bridges grass-roots activism with academic scholarship and through this approach Dr. Encalada Grez has extensively documented the lives of Mexican migrant farmworker women who work and forge transnational livelihoods between rural Canada and rural Mexico. Born in Chile during the military dictatorship and settling in Canada with her family as a child, her immigrant working-class struggles and forced migration inspire her academic and political work for global justice. View her faculty profile page here.
Bryan Evans is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. Prior to his appointment to a tenure-stream position, Bryan worked as a policy advisor/researcher at the Ontario Legislative Assembly, the Ministry of Labour, and the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. His research centres on questions relating to the political economy of the state, the construction of public policy, and democratic administration.
Jordan House is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Labour Studies at Brock University. He holds a PhD in Political Science from York University and received his MA from the University of New Brunswick. His research focuses on prison labour and prisoner-worker organizing, new forms of worker organization, and labour movement renewal. His work has appeared in a number of publications including Labour / Le Travail, Labor Studies Journal, Rankandfile.ca, Canadian Dimension, and Jacobin.
Dr. Ibukun Olorunisola Kolawole is a Senior Lecturer in the department of Human Resources and Employment Relations, Faculty of Management Sciences, Lagos State University, Ojo, Nigeria.He obtained a PhD degree in Industrial, Organisational and Labour Studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. His area of research interest is situated at the intersection of changing nature of work, labour movement and labour regulations.
Dr. Kolawole has been actively involved in research through self-initiative and collaboration. He has published a considerable number of articles in accredited/peer-reviewed scientific journals, both locally and internationally. He is involved with teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and supervises both doctoral and master’s research at the University.
Naomi Lightman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her areas of research expertise include care work (paid and unpaid), migration, gender, aging and inequality. Her academic work has been published in journals including European Sociological Review, Journal of European Social Policy, International Migration Review and the Social Politics. In addition, she is the co-author of the second edition of the textbook Social Policy in Canada. Dr. Lightman has collaborated on research focused on immigration, race, and inequality with various social agencies and government bodies including Social Planning Toronto, the Wellesley Institute, the Calgary Local Immigration Partnership and the Calgary Immigrant Women’s Association.
Ian MacDonald is a professor in the School of Industrial Relations at Université de Montréal. His research interests include labour politics, organization and union bargaining strategies, comparative political economy, labour geography, urban policy, labour relations in Latin America and globalization. His research has already resulted in numerous publications and scientific outreach activities. Ian has a PhD (Political Science) from York University. He has recently been a Visiting Scholar at the Worker Institute of Cornell University's ILR School and an adjunct professor at the Murphy Institute of the City University of New York.
Currently Dan instructs for Seneca College, Canadore College, Nipissing University, and Ontario Learn, the on-line instructional consortium for Ontario’s colleges. He has also instructed and/or designed courses for York University, Conestoga and St Lawrence colleges. He has over 15 years of experience designing and leading distance education courses. Dan’s areas of expertise include corporate social responsibility, precarious employment/temporary staffing, stakeholder theory, and occupational health & safety. Dan holds a Masters in Human Resources Management (MHRM) from York, a degree in Adult Education from Brock, and an Honours BA from York. He completed a Graduate Certificate in HR Management at Seneca, where he also earned a Certificate for Excellence in Educating Adults. His commitment to lifelong learning has also led him to undertake further studies in Industrial Relations (Queen’s), Alternative Dispute Resolution (Windsor), Training & Development (St Francis Xavier), and Management Techniques (Schulich). He currently holds a CHRL designation from the HRPA. Dan participated in the development of the original training requirements and training modules for certification as a health and safety representative. In addition to contributing to or being acknowledged in a number of books related to studies in Human Resources Management, on multiple occasions Dan has been a speaker at HRPA Conferences, at a number of IAPA/WSPS sessions, and has contributed articles and/or interviews to various media outlets. He is also a contributor to the GLRC’s ‘Know Your Rights’ information brochures.
Suzanne Mills is Associate Professor and University Scholar at McMaster University, cross-appointed in the School of Labour Studies and the School of Earth, Environment and Society. Mills’ research examines how settler-Indigenous relations and gender structure work and labour markets in forestry, mining and construction. In this research, Mills has worked closely with Inuit and First Nation governments to critically examine Indigenous employment plans emanating from Impact Benefit Agreements. More recently, Mills has been working on a research project examining the experiences of LGBTQ+ workers in deindustrializing cities in northern and southwestern Ontario in partnership with Unifor, the United Steelworkers, the Sudbury Workers Education and Advocacy Centre, and the Windsor Workers Education Centre.
Tanner Mirrlees is an Associate Professor in the program of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University. For nearly a decade, Mirrlees has taught a course on the transformation of work and labour in the digital age. He is writing a new book called Work in the Digital Media and Creative Industries: A Critical Introduction (Routledge), and has published articles such as "Reality TV's Embrace of the Intern", "Reality TV's Low Wage and No-Wage Workforce", "Producing Entertainment in the New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL)" and "Pokemon Go's Precarious Playbour." Mirrlees is also the author/co-editor of books such as The Television Reader: Critical Perspectives in Canadian and US Television Studies (Oxford University Press); Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization (Routledge); Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Culture Industry (University of British Columbia Press); Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change (Rowman & Littlefield); and EdTech Inc: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age (Routledge). You can read some of Mirrlees’ work here.
Dr. (Ms) Arti Nanavati is a retired Professor and Chair, Department of Economics, Faculty of Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, Gujarat, India. She also held additional positions of Director, UGC, Centre for Canadian Studies (2003-2016) and Joint Director, Women's Studies Research Centre (2000-2005). She is a recipient of Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellowship at London School of Economics (1988-89) and Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, Canadian Studies and research fellowships at University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia. Arti's main areas of research interest are migration, gender and social capital. Under Shastri fellowships, she researched labour market performance of south Asia born women and role of social capital in labour market outcomes in Canada. Her research project sponsored by Government of Gujarat, explores the role of social capital in capability building among tribals of South Gujarat. Arti's recent research examines nexus among 'migration-remittances- development' based on the National Sample Survey Organization's report on migration in India.
Klara Öberg is a lecturer in Work Science at the Academy of Health and Welfare, Halmstad University, Sweden. She holds a PhD in anthropology and ethnology from École des haute études en sciences sociales in Paris. Her PhD thesis investigated the precarious working conditions for asylum seekers and irregular migrants in the unregulated labour market in Sweden. Further research experiences cover topics such as migration and the governance of integration in relation to housing, education and labour, etc. The unregulated labour market and the informal economy in relation to globalization, social rights, migration regulation, labour law and the dismantling of the welfare state from an intersectional perspectives are other research areas. Currently, Klara is working on a research project on the notion of crisis and its relation to migration, governance, change and the labour market in Sweden. Additionally she is writing about the relation between labour unions, irregular migrant labour and the labour market in France.
Kam Phung is an Incoming Assistant Professor of Business & Society / Sustainability at the Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on how we organize and innovate for social change in the face of pressing societal challenges, and includes work on issues such as modern slavery and forced labour as well as stigma and marginalization in the workplace. Some of his published empirical research has included an examination of the business models of modern slavery in the UK's food, construction, and cannabis industries and a 4-year study on the impact of Uber's entry into Toronto on the stigmatization of the local taxi driving occupation. Kam holds a PhD in organization studies from the Schulich School of Business, York University, where he was also a Canada Vanier Scholar, and completed a SSHRC postdoctoral research fellowship at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He also holds an MSc in sustainable development (HEC Paris), MSc in economics and business administration (Norwegian School of Economics), and BCom in international business (University of Victoria), and spent several years in industry working with various organizations around the world tackling social and environmental issues. Learn more about Kam at: https://www.kamphung.ca/
Dr. Selim Reza is Assistant Professor and Head of Academic Programmes at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, BRAC University, Bangladesh. He teaches and researches theories and practices of development, international political economy, human trafficking, migration, nationalism, modern slavery, forced labour, work and employment. Earlier he was Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Development Studies at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. He has a PhD in migration, work and employment from the College of Business, Government and Law at Flinders University, Australia where he taught socio-legal studies and sociological research methods. Before his PhD, he was a Research and Communications Officer for the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh and worked for the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium based in the University of Sussex, UK. His key research interests span labour migration and employment relationship issues that are theoretically founded in the political economy of migrant labour and contingent employment practices. He is keen on academic research in growing inequalities and exploitation of migrant labourers, as a working class, within the neoliberal economic and social model. He is the author of the book “The Construction Precariat” published by Taylor & Francis (Routledge, UK).
Stephanie Ross is Director and Associate Professor in the School of Labour Studies at McMaster University. Her teaching and research focus on the politics and dynamics of labour movements, especially how unions deal with key questions of structure, democracy, bargaining priorities, political vision, political strategy, and collective identity. She is most concerned with strategies to renew the power of working people’s organizations. She is currently the principal investigator on a five-year research project called Union Politics in the 21stCentury, which seeks to understand the most effective strategies unions are using to influence public policy and improve workers’ lives. She has co-edited three books, Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada, Public Sector Unions in the Age of Austerity, and Labour Under Attack: Anti-Unionism in Canada, and co-authored another, Building a Better World: An Introduction to the Labour Movement in Canada. She was the founding president of the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies between 2013-2018.
Larry Savage is Chair of the Department of Labour Studies at Brock University and President of the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies. His teaching and research is focused on collective bargaining, union strategy, and labour politics. Professor Savage is also a former member of the Executive Council of the Ontario Federation of Labour.
Peter Sawchuck- Professor Social Justice Education OISE University of Toronto. Dr. Sawchuk's research areas of specialization include the Adult Education; Adult Learning Theory; Cultural Historical Activity Theory; Marxist Theory; Sociology of Work; Communication and Cognition at Work; Technological Design and Human Computer Interaction at Work; Labour Education; Labour Studies; Social Movement Studies.
Richa Shivakoti is a Senior Research Associate at the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University. Previously, she was a Research Officer at the LERRN project at Carleton University and a post-doctoral research fellow at Maastricht University and the United Nations University (UNU-MERIT) in the Netherlands. She has also been affiliated with various academic institutions in Nepal, Singapore, and the United States.
Richa holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the National University of Singapore and a dual Masters in Public Affairs and Political Science from Indiana University. Her research interests include the different facets of the migration-development nexus including international labour migration, remittance, gender, forced migration, diaspora, and Asian migration governance.
Myer Siemiatycki is Professor Emeritus (Politics Department) Ryerson University. My PhD is from York University in Labour History. For many years I organized the annual Ryerson Union Fair, designed to familiarize students with the labour movement. I now coordinate the the Young Workers Rights Hub, housed in Ryerson's Faculty of Arts. I was past Founding Director of Ryerson's graduate program of Immigration & Settlement Studies. My research has spanned labour, urban and immigration studies.
Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Department of Political Science and Sociology, North South University (NSU), Bangladesh. Prior to joining at NSU, he worked as an Associate Professor at the Department of Development Studies, Daffodil International University (DIU) and General Education Department (GED), University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). He also engaged as an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), a research centre which conducts research on refugees, internally displaced persons, stateless people, labour migrants and diaspora communities. He is the author of several books and articles that have been published by reputable international publishers. He had also been involved in a number of studies under the Migration out of Poverty RPC and Development Research Centre (DRC), University of Sussex, UK. Sikder was a recipient of the NTS-Asia Research Fellowship from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Mr. Sikder has over 20 years of empirical research, 10 years of teaching, and 8 years of professional experience as a Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning Expert with UN and different international donor agencies. Sikder’s research expertise includes internal and international labour migration; modern slavery and labour migration recruitment (OLR) process; returnee migrants' reintegration; remittances, development, dependency and inequality; migration and TVET Skills for employment; forced migration and the situation of the Rohingya (Myanmar) refugees; irregular cross-border migration, human smuggling and trafficking; ready-made garments (RMG), trade Unions and women empowerment; and climate change-induced migration, urban resettlement and livelihood.
Sikder is a guest editor for the Journal of Frontiers in Human Dynamics and an external reviewer for the Journal of Migration and Development, Asian Pacific Migration Journal, Journal of Borderland Studies, Journal of Immigration and Refugee Studies, book reviewer for Palgrave MacMillan, India, and Advisory Editor for Migration Mirror, RMMRU's quarterly newsletter. Sikder has also presented papers at national and international workshops, conferences, and seminars in countries such as Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Spain, Qatar, South Africa, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Switzerland, the Philippines, and the United States. He is a television personality who regularly appears on talk shows to address migration and refugee issues.
Paramjit Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, Panjab University, Chandigarh (India). For his recent research collaboration was with York Center for Asia Research he worked on political trust in India. His area of specialisation is Marxian Political Economy and Development Economics. He has published more than 30 research papers in journals of international repute. He recently co-edited a volume titled “Global Political Economy: A Critique of Contemporary Capitalism.” His recent articles include "Classical Theory of Imperialism and Contemporary Capitalism" in Journal of Contemporary Asia (2022) and “The Economic Consequences of Prime Minister Modi” in Studies in Political Economy (2020). He is also the coordinator of Indian Political Economy Association. Presently he is on a sabbatical, working on two book projects (Themes in Marxian Political Economy and Class Dynamics of Agrarian Capitalism in India) and enjoying the Canadian winter in Toronto.
Charles Smith (Ph.D York) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. His research interests include Canadian and International political economy, public law, labour unions and federal and provincial public policy. He is currently working on a SSHRC funded project examining the Canadian labour movement’s interaction with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He is the author of numerous articles on the political economy of labour. Charles is the chair of the Social Justice and the Common Good committee at St. Thomas More College.
Susan Spronk is associate professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies. Her research focuses on the experience of development in Latin America, more specifically the impact of neoliberalism on the transformation of the state and the rise of anti-privatization movements in the Andean region. She is one of the co-founders of the Blended Finance Project, which analyzes the impact of privatization on the delivery of foreign aid and explores alternatives. In terms of funded research, she is currently investigating the impact of cash transfer systems on women's empowerment in the context of the post-racialized (capitalist) transitions in South Africa and Bolivia, which is funded by SSHRC (2016-2021). Her most previous SSHRC-sponsored research project (2011-2015) focused on local democracy and water service delivery in Bolivia and Venezuela. She obtained her PhD in Political Science from York University. Prior to joining the University of Ottawa faculty, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Cornell University. She is also a research associate with the Municipal Services Project, which focuses on policy alternatives in municipal service delivery in Africa, Asia and Latin America and an active trade unionist in the post-secondary sector in Canada.
Adekunle Tinuoye is Assistant Director of Labour Management Relations at the Micheal Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies, Ilorin, Nigeria. He holds an MSc Sociology, Master of Industrial and Labour Relations and a Joint European Master of Arts in Comparative Local Development from the Universities of Ilorin, Nigeria and Trento, Italy respectively. Mr Tinuoye is a trainer, advocate, lecturer, activist and educator with interests in employee/employer partnerships, human/workers’ rights, gender issues in employment, global union solidarity/development, and workplace conflict resolution. He is the national president of the Nigerian National Labour Educators parliament and serves as a reviewer for journals such as Academic Labour, Research and Artistry Journal, Colorado State University etc. His current research is investigating the impact of ethics in trade union leadership in terms of effectively and sincerely advancing and championing worker interests.
Salim Vally is the National Research Foundation's Chair in Community, Adult and Worker's Education; the Director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg (UJ); and a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University. He studied at the universities of Witwatersrand (Wits), York and KwaZulu-Natal and was a visiting lecturer at Columbia, Virginia, York and Fort Hare universities. He continues to publish (8 books, 43 journal articles and 48 chapters in peer reviewed books) while agreeing with Howard Zinn that “most academics publish while others perish” and therefore continues with his abiding interest in linking academic scholarship with workers' rights, community participation and global solidarity.
Vally was a leading member of the Black Consciousness aligned South African Students Movement in 1976/1977 and left the country after its banning by the erstwhile apartheid regime and after severe repression. He returned to South Africa in 1982, taught at secondary schools and worked for progressive literacy organizations. From 1985 to 1994 he was the education officer for a trade union before joining Wits University in 1995. He joined UJ in 2009. Vally is active in various social movements and solidarity organizations and a regular commentator in the media.
Anelyse Weiler is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria. Her research explores the convergence of social inequalities and environmental crises in the food system, with a focus on struggles for migrant justice and decent work across the food chain. Some of her research projects include a comparison of Canadian and U.S. temporary farm labour migration programs, the environmental and cultural politics of meat production, and the revival of craft cider livelihoods. She actively contributes to several organizations advocating for food security, dignified employment, and migrant rights, including the B.C. Employment Standards Coalition, Justice for Migrant Workers, and the Migrant Worker Health Expert Working Group. Her website is: https://anelyseweiler.com/
Don Wells is Professor Emeritus, School of Labour Studies and Department of Political Science at McMaster University. Current research centres on 1) transnational labour activism to improve international labour rights and standards; and 2) better public policies to provide labour and citizenship rights to migrant workers in Canada; 3) effective forms of participatory labour/community organizing to improve work conditions and living standards in Canada.
C.R. Yadu is a socioeconomist based in Bangalore, India. Currently, he is working as an Assistant Professor in Economics at RV University, Bangalore. For his PhD, he did a study on the changes in agriculture and labour in the post-liberalisation India by closely examining the case of two villages in South India. He is proficient in empirically and theoretically grounded research using mixed methods. His main research interest is in studying the way capitalism unfolds in the rural/urban spaces in the global South and its distributional dynamics.
