Labour Studies x Sociology Speaker Series: Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez

When: Monday October 24, 2022 10AM-12PM

Where: LR Wilson Hall Community Room (#1003)

Abstract

This talk focuses on the transnational lives of Mexican migrant farmworker women who form part of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) in Canada. Comprising a numerical minority within this long standing Temporary Foreign Worker Program, their lives, the ways they organize themselves to be able to migrate for work, and the working conditions they face in Canadian farms are differentially structured and experienced through their intersecting identities as racialized low-income rural women. Based on a longitudinal transnational ethnography with Mexican migrant women and their families through the approach of “convivir”, this talk offers insights on broadening the scope of inquiry with precarious workers within the global economy and charts new directions for research and advocacy with and for the migrant worker community in the Hamilton-Niagara region and beyond.   

Bio

Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez is an Assistant Professor in Labour Studies and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.  She is the co-founder of the award wining collective, Justice for Migrant Workers, J4MW, that has advocated for the rights of migrant farmworkers in Canada for over two decades.  As a community engaged scholar and Public Sociologist Dr. Encalada Grez has mobilized her migrant-labour research through various media such as documentaries and given talks in venues such as Parliament Hill, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and at the United Nations in New York. She has also worked with export-processing workers in Mexico and Central America and as lead travelling faculty teaching social justice issues to university students from the USA in over 6 countries.