By Nick Ward
There are many advantages to taking a multidisciplinary approach to research.
No matter what the topic, cutting across disciplinary borders stimulates investigative nuance, encourages the use of diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, and helps cultivate rich and robust findings.
As Professor Amrita Hari in the Institute of Women's and Gender Studies and Professor Luciara Nardon in the Sprott School of Business can attest, adopting a multidisciplinary approach is essential when examining the complex intersectional issues and identities involved in migration and transnational processes.
Together, their Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-supported research project has been investigating the challenges faced by highly skilled women immigrants as they attempt to enter and integrate into the Canadian labour market.
Professionally trained and qualified immigrant women consistently face unemployment, underemployment, and discriminatory downward career mobility upon arriving in Canada. They are also regularly impeded in their career progress due to the burden of their often dependent immigration status, weighty domestic responsibilities, and persistent gender-based prejudices and labour market segmentation.
For their project, Hari and Nardon have implemented a transformative interview approach which rejects esoteric academic conventions and operates based on their mutual understanding that traditional research interviews are not neutral exchanges of knowledge.
To achieve this, they have done everything they can to ensure that participants also benefit from the research process by creating opportunities for self-reflection and self-understanding, and an enhanced sense of empowerment.
Hari and Nardon met only a few years ago, but are now close friends and productive research collaborators. Just recently, the duo submitted two co-authored articles. One explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigrant women's career trajectories, also published for a general audience in The Conversation. Another adopts the lens of transnationalism to uncover Canadian international student experiences of the ongoing pandemic, revealing the increased challenges and heightened reliance on support from transnational families, and generated anxieties about their future career and mobilities.
Despite their busy schedules, Hari and Nardon were generous enough to sit down for a conversation about the value of multidisciplinary collaboration, their important SSHRC project, and how COVID-19 has deepened social inequalities, making good research even more critical.
Fittingly, the professors responded to each question as a team.
Hi Professor Hari and Professor Nardon. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat. How did your fruitful research partnership come about?
We met through the activities of the Labour Force Barriers Research Group funded by Carleton University's Multidisciplinary Research Catalyst Fund (MCRF). We quickly realized that we shared a common concern with immigrant integration and complemented each other's perspectives by bringing an organizational perspective (Luciara) and a gender and policy perspective (Amrita). We both share very similar work styles and found that bringing these different perspectives together enriched our individual work.
We applied for the SSHRC Insight Grant to formalize our cross-disciplinary collaboration before we had any inkling of an impending global pandemic. Through the arduous process of grant writing, we soon became close friends and began to process together various aspects of our professional lives, including our supervisory and mentoring roles. At the onset of the pandemic, the international students under our supervision spoke to us of the surmounting challenges they were facing as a result of their precarious immigration status in Canada. We were motivated to apply for a Centre for Research in Inclusion at Work (CRIW) Ignite Grant to study the pandemic experiences of international students. Soon after, we began work on a SSHRC Engage Grant examining the experiences of highly skilled immigrant women. Both of these smaller projects are now in the publication stage as we embark on the SSHRC IG.
What began as a coffee following our first meeting as part of the MCRF has now transformed into a friendship and research partnership for at least the next five years and hopefully more.
How have your aforementioned distinctive disciplinary perspectives influenced your research?
Our collaborative work is richer and better. We bring different literatures, methodologies, and perspectives to bear on the same topic, resulting in a more robust and sophisticated understanding of any given issue.
For instance, our recent submission exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigrant women's career trajectories brought into conversation Luciara's organizational perspective on employment and diversity with Amrita's knowledge of gender and transnational issues. Together, we contributed a more holistic and rich understanding of the challenges and strategies employed by people to cope with a global crisis. We learn from each other during every interaction – our conversations are exciting and illuminating, which we hope to reflect in our joint authorship.
In addition to our personal research outcomes, we feel that students under our supervision will also benefit from this cross-disciplinary exposure and learn to communicate across different academic disciplines and sectors. We hope that these opportunities for broad-based training will help students acquire improved transferrable skills and grow into fulfilling careers.
Three years into your five-year SSHRC funded project, what does existing research (yours and others) suggest are the obstacles faced by skilled women immigrants as they attempt to integrate the Canadian labour market?
Many skilled migrants undergo deskilling, downward career mobility, underemployment, unemployment, and talent waste, finding themselves in low-skilled occupations that are not commensurate to their education and experience. Skilled immigrant women face additional gendered disadvantages, including a disproportionate domestic burden, interrupted careers, and gender segmentation in occupations and organizations.
In our recent study, we found that the pandemic increased immigrant women's experience of inequality by pushing them towards unemployment, lower-skilled, or less stable employment. Most immigrant women had their career trajectory delayed, interrupted, or reversed due to layoffs, decreased job opportunities, and increased domestic burden, which could have potential long-term consequences. The pandemic's gendered nature and work-at-home environments heightened immigrant women's challenges due to limited social support and increased family responsibilities.
How have you been conducting this vitally important research?
We are engaging with participants using a transformative interview approach. Recognizing that academic research lags behind issues facing practitioners and that most academic writing is inaccessible to those that need the knowledge, scholars are increasingly calling for embedding social impact in the research process (doing socially useful research). This has been of feminist interest that we hope can find a home in business, management, organizational and labour studies. This would reflect a coming together of our disciplinary homes.
In times of global crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the social usefulness of research becomes more urgent as social inequalities come to the fore. The COVID-19 pandemic reignited public debates on the adverse socio-economic effects on women in both paid and unpaid reproductive labour with some specific conversations about healthcare workers and academics. Women experience greater work inequality, including high unemployment, as well as increased child and elder care burdens. Immigrant women encounter particular vulnerabilities due to their gender, racialized, and non-citizen status, influencing their employment experiences. We add to the ongoing conversation about the gendered effects of the pandemic by revealing the heightened vulnerability of immigrant women as employment opportunities decrease while family demands increase.
We are taking a transformative approach and assuming that our understanding of their issues should happen concurrently to supporting them. A transformative approach rejects the notion that interviews are neutral activities in which knowledge is transferred from participants to researchers. Rather, it assumes that the interviewer influences the participants' process of sensemaking and aim to intervene with intention. These interventions are aimed at creating opportunities for self-reflection in which new understandings are made possible. To develop this method and defend this methodology, we adopt practices from coaching protocols and other therapeutic techniques to design an interview approach that is supportive of research participants.
Has the global pandemic influenced your findings?
In short, yes, and we have adapted our research design to reflect this. While we knew from the start that immigrant women faced specific vulnerabilities in building their professional, social, and personal lives in Canada, the pandemic has demonstrated that their situation is worsening. We felt compelled to take this into account by rethinking our focus and approach.
We had originally planned to conduct traditional qualitative interviews with a group of immigrant women at different points over five years. Instead, now, we are employing a transformative approach to data collection to understand and simultaneously offer support to our research participants. We are also hoping to take a longitudinal approach still, but focus on the potential long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic by tracking the pre- and post-pandemic professional lives, work-life balance, and sensemaking practices of immigrant women.
It seems your project has tremendous potential to influence policy both at the national and international level substantially.
In addition to contributing to ongoing academic research on the lives of immigrants, we are hoping to make some concrete policy recommendations. One of the avenues for policy intervention is organized social support across federal, provincial, and municipal jurisdictions. We aim to understand the role of organized forms of social support for immigrant women's social and professional integration in Canada over time. To do this, we will investigate the challenges immigrant women face to integrate socially and professionally in their first five years of arrival in Canada. We will understand from them the support they receive, the roles of different sources of support (ethnic groups, non-governmental organizations, employers, and members of the local community), to identify what is available, needed, and requires improvement. We will also be asking our participants about organizational practices in specific industries, sectors, and workplaces. We wish to take this information to identify some best practices to share with civil society organizations that worked to help immigrant women and strengthen cross-sectoral research partnerships.
Thank you very much for your time, Professors. Let's chat about your groundbreaking project again soon.
Sure thing! Thank you.