Dr. Kim de Laat, a sociologist of work and culture, is working with Andrea Doucet and with Norah Keating and Margo Hilbtrecht from The Vanier Institute of the Family. As a MITACS Accelerate postdoctoral fellow, de Laat is collaborating with Doucet on a project examining the relationship between fathers’ use of flexible work arrangements and parental leave. At the Vanier Institute of the Family, she is exploring implications of care/work policies for family well-being and is leading the development of a family diversity initiative.
de Laat’s work with the RC/W project flows from her postdoctoral work at the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the Rotman School of Business, University of Toronto that examined how the social organization of work influences parents’ use of remote work. It also builds on her doctoral work at the University of Toronto on media portrayals of parents and uncertainties and inequalities in paid work and household and family responsibilities.
Dr. Sadie Goddard-Durant, an applied social psychologist, is working with Doucet to further expand and deepen her work with the Black-led, Black serving, Afrocentric community-based organization TAIBU Community Health Centre (CHC). This research will build on Goddard-Durant and Doucet’s previous collaboration on a study of young motherhood with TAIBU and Strive Niagara. As part of the RC/W project, Goddard-Durant will lead a study to identify policy changes to improve Black newcomer parents’ capacities to care for their families. This will involve visual, arts-based research methodologies and policy analysis.
This project is informed by Goddard-Durant’s decade-long work with community-based organizations supporting Black Caribbean persons, her lived experiences as a Black Caribbean immigrant to Canada, and her ongoing critical research on resilience that aims to minimize the racialized, gendered, colonialist daily living conditions that Black persons (women in particular) experience.
Dr. Janna Klostermann, a feminist sociologist, is working as a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral fellow with Doucet. As part of her research with the RC/W project, Klostermann and Doucet are currently developing and testing visual and participatory methods for exploring how and why people organize their unpaid care work and paid work in the ways that they do, and how this is connected to wider social contexts and social policies. These methods will then be further developed and used by the wider research team.
Klostermann will build on her PhD research, which used arts-based and auto-ethnographic methods to explore the limits of care and gaps in care policies in Canada. She recently published an article in The Conversation ( June 2021) on women’s struggles and feelings of being “stuck” while taking on additional care work and family responsibilities. She was also recently featured in the Brock News.
Dr. Sophie Mathieu, a sociologist who specializes in the study of Quebec family policy and early childhood care services, is working with Dr Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay from TÉLUQ University as part of the RC/W project. Their work focuses on work-family reconciliation during the COVID 19 pandemic and documents the paradoxical effects of the pandemic health crisis on time conflicts experienced by Québecois mothers and fathers.
Mathieu’s work is informed by her recently completed SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship with Doucet, and her five-year research collaboration with Doucet and colleague Lindsey McKay which has demonstrated the differences between Canada’s two parental leave regimes and inequalities in the receipt of parental benefits in Canada by both gender and social class. She is particularly interested in the transformation and evolution of the Quebec model of early childhood care services. She is also an active public intellectual, with recent contributions to The Conversation and Policy Options.
