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Care Activism during COVID-Times: Migrant Care Workers & Resistance
January 27, 2022 at 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM
| Cost: | Free |
Dr. Ethel Tungohan
Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts and Activism, York University
2:30 ET via Zoom
Through programs like the Foreign Domestics Movement, the Live-in Caregiver Program, and the Caregiver Program, Canada recruits migrant women to come into the country to meet its essential caregiving needs. Yet contrary to popular, mainstream depictions of care workers as being abject and lacking in agency, migrant care workers have long been part of migrant care worker movements that provide them with a conduit for political action. In this talk, I discuss findings from my decade-long examination of the migrant care workers’ movement in Canada and from my collaborative research project on Care Workers During COVID-19. In answering the question, “how do those ‘hard to locate on the map of democracy’ act politically?,” I show that migrant care workers are engaged in political action through social movements and through research and policy interventions. They engage in what I call ‘Care Activism,’ which I define as the distinct ways that migrant workers care for themselves, for each other, for fellow migrant workers in their immediate circles, and for the larger, transnational community of migrant workers and their families that forms part of their ‘imagined communities.’
Ethel Tungohan is a Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts, and Activism and an Associate Professor of Politics at York University. Her forthcoming book manuscript, Care Activism: Migrant Care Workers, Communities of Care, and Movement Building (University of Illinois Press), examines migrant care worker activism in Canada from 2009 until 2020. She has written widely on immigration policy, social movements, intersectionality, gender and ‘diversity’ politics, and socially engaged research. She is an enthusiastic proponent of socially-engaged research and has long history collaborating on research projects with migrant organizations in Canada such as Migrant Resource Centre Canada (MRCC), Migrante-Canada, and Gabriela-Ontario.
This event is sponsored by the Bell Chair in Canadian Parliamentary Democracy.
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