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.
Ali Rıza Güngen is a political scientist whose research focuses on dependent financialization, crisis management in the global South, and public banks. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Queen’s University at Kingston, Global Development Studies. He worked as a lecturer at Kassel University and was a distance fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Güngen published extensively on the political economy of the Global South. His articles appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies and New Political Economy. He co-edited the 2019 book The Political Economy of Financial Transformation in Turkey, and his new book Politics of Debt: Financial Inclusion in Turkey (in Turkish) has been published in 2021. He is currently researching the public bank actions amid the Covid-19 pandemic and working on a book manuscript that will compare the trajectories of financialization in the global South in the 21st century.
Pinar Bedirhanoglu is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics at York University and an Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She got her PhD in international relations from the University of Sussex, UK in 2002. She has published in English and Turkish, and also had articles translated to German and French on neoliberal state transformation, state-capital relations, privatizations and financialisation in Turkey; political economy of corruption and neoliberal anti-corruption policies; and politics of capitalist transformation in Russia. Her most recent research addresses the neoliberal transformation of state security structures, and state transformation within and through financialisation.
Donna Baines is a Professor and Chair Social Work and Social Policy at University of Sydney, Australia (from 2015). Prior to Australia, she taught labour studies and social work at McMaster University, Canada for +15 years. Her international, comparative research program focuses on paid and unpaid care work, quality work/quality care, restructuring in the social services sector, and anti-oppressive social work theory + practice. Prof. Baines' favorite method at the moment is rapid ethnography in care workplaces, and she is currently involved in three international, funded research projects using this method (including an Australian Research Council grant). Baines recently published on care work in Critical Social Policy, Journal of Industrial Relations and Journal of Social Work. In 2017, she published the third edition of her best-selling (in Canada) edited collection, Doing Anti-Oppressive Practice, Social Justice Social Work (Fernwood), and the 7th edition of the now co-authored Canadian social work classic text, Case Critical. Social Services and Social Justice (with Ben Carniol, Raven Sinclair and Banakonda Kennedy-Kish Bell, Between the Lines, 2017). She teaches in social justice, social policy, labour markets and critical practice.
Dr. Bozkurt-Gungen is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and the Department of Political Science at York University. She is a scholar in residence at the Global Labour Research Centre at York for the 2018-2019 academic year. She received her PhD in political science from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Her research lies at the intersection of labour studies and comparative political economy. She has worked extensively on the transformation of labour markets and forms of state involvement in labour relations in Turkey and Argentina. Her academic interest extends to social movements, political regime transformations, as well as the perennial questions of social policy and political economy. Her current research addresses the links between authoritarian forms of governance; relations of production and social reproduction; and limits to and prospects for collective, democratic empowerment. Dr. Bozkurt-Gungen has articles published in academic journals such as South European Society and Politics and Journal of International Relations & Development.
Fay Faraday is a lawyer with an independent social justice practice in Toronto. She represents unions, community organizations and coalitions in constitutional litigation, human rights and labour. She has represented clients in constitutional litigation at all levels of court, including numerous cases at the Supreme Court of Canada. She also works collaboratively with community organizations and coalitions on strategic and policy advice. Fay holds an Innovation Fellowship with the Metcalf Foundation where she is engaged in legal and community-based research addressing the rights of migrant workers. Her reports Made in Canada: How the Law Constructs Migrant Workers’ Insecurity and Profiting from the Precarious: How Recruitment Practices Exploit Migrant Workers [PDF] were published by the Metcalf Foundation in 2012 and 2014. Fay is also a Visiting Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. Fay is the Visiting Packer Chair in Social Justice at York University from 2014-2016.
Young-Kyu Shin is a PhD student in Sociology at the Department of Social Research at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He majored in social policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and public administration at Seoul National University and worked as a researcher for national research institutes in South Korea. Since 2013, he has conducted his doctoral research on precarious workers’ union membership and sociopolitical attitudes in Europe. In 2017, his article “New social risk groups, industrial relations regimes and union membership” was published in the Journal of European Social Policy. His research interests include precarious employment in the post-industrial ear, social and labour market policy transformations, comparative welfare state analysis, and quantitative research methods. He has conducted research as an International Visiting Research Trainee at the Global Labour Research Centre at York University in 2018.
Marco Marrone is a PhD student in Sociology of labour and economic processes at the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Bologna. He also actively collaborates with the Institute of Economic and Social Research of Emilia-Romagna linked with CGIL trade union. This collaboration has resulted in a number of relevant publications, among which the article "Voucher: the occasional work in Italy and Emilia-Romagna" has received attention from national media. His research interests include global transformations of capitalism and the impacts on both formal and informal work, the transformations of labour markets especially those involving young workers, the organizing experiences of precarious workers, labour policies and the welfare state in the era of globalization, and the effects of neoliberalism and austerity policies on the living conditions of people. He has published two peer-reviewed articles in Italian and several articles for on-line reviews. In 2016-17, he held an International Visiting Traineeship at the Global Labour Research Centre.
Esra Sarioglu received her Ph.D. in Sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies Division, in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Ankara University, Turkey. Her primary research areas are gender and labor in global era. She is particularly interested in examining how the global economy interacts with social constructions of gender and gender hierarchies. Esra’s ethnographic research projects focus on Turkey, where women’s labor force participation rates are low by international standards, even when compared to other countries at similar levels of economic development, engaging with the literature on the feminization of labor. These projects have focused in particular on working class women, such as home-based workers and saleswomen in relation to questions of the cultural politics of sexuality and aesthetics at work as well as the constitution of self and subjectivity at the intersection of class and gender. Esra’s scholarly articles have been published in Gender, Work & Organization and Women's Studies International Forum.
Carlo Fanelli is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Politics & Public Administration, Ryerson University, with interests in critical political economy, labour studies, public policy, climate change, social movements, urban sociology and education. He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Carleton University, with a specialization in Political Economy, and his MA in Sociology and BA Honours in Political Science and Sociology from York University. Carlo serves as editor of Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research and maintains a collection of his writing at carlofanelli.org.
Andrew Jackson was the Packer Visiting Professor of Social Justice at York University for 2012-2014 and is Senior Policy Adviser to the Broadbent Institute. In September 2012 he retired from a long career as Chief Economist and Director of Social and Economic Policy with the Canadian Labour Congress. He was awarded the Sefton Prize by the University of Toronto for his lifetime contributions to industrial relations in 2011. Educated at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he earned a BSc and MSc in Economics, and at the University of British Columbia, Mr. Jackson is the author of numerous articles and five books, including Work and Labour in Canada: Critical Issues, which is now in its second edition with Canadian Scholars Press.
Kevin Skerrett is a Senior Research Officer at the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and has worked on pension issues for eighteen of his twenty years there. His academic work includes an MA in political economy from Carleton University. In 2009, he spent a year working at the Bureau for Workers’ Activities at the International Labour Organization, working on the launch of the International Journal of Labour Research. In 2013-14 he was on a sabbatical leave from CUPE, pursuing a research and education project examining the role played by privately invested pension funds in today’s increasingly “financialized” capitalism. He was a Scholar in Residence at the Global Labour Research Centre at York University for the Fall 2013 term.