Team

Andrea Doucet is the Project Director and Principal Investigator of this Partnership program.  She has published widely on care/work practices and responsibilities, fathering, parental leave policies, feminist and ecological onto-epistemologies, narrative analysis, research ethics, and genealogies of concepts. She is a Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work, and Care, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Brock University and Adjunct Research Professor in Sociology at Carleton University and the University of Victoria. Andrea is the Co-Coordinator of the International Network of Leave Policies and Research (2021-2026) and Director of the Research Studio for Narrative, Visual and Digital Methods.

You can learn more about her work at andreadoucet.com and https://brocku.ca/research-studio/

Martha Friendly is the founder and executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit (CRRU), an independent childcare policy research institute. Martha has worked on childcare research for more than 40 years, collaborating with the community sector, researchers and policy makers. She has substantial expertise in childcare and family policy in Canada and internationally, publishing extensively in academic, technical and popular venues and authoring two books on childcare policy. Martha has been awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal and an honourary doctorate from Trent University recognizing her contributions to Canadian childcare and has been a member of many advisory groups such as the current federal childcare minister’s Expert Panel on Early Learning and Child Care.

Donna Lero is University Professor Emeritus, Department of Family Relations & Applied Nutrition, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.  She was the Inaugural Jarislowsky Chair in Families and Work and co-founded the University’s Centre for Families, Work and Well-Being. Her interests include work-family policies and practices; the relationship between care, gender and employment; parental leave policy design and impacts; and early childhood education and care policies and programs.

Susan Prentice is Duff Roblin Professor of Government at the University of Manitoba, where she began her career as Margaret Laurence Chair in Women’s Studies. Her whole academic career has focussed on care, gender, and families, with a primary specialization in historical and contemporary childcare policy. She practices public sociology,  and has a long track record of engagement with childcare advocacy organizations and community-based women’s groups.

Sylvia Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, and Academic Director of the British Columbia Research Data Centres Network. Her research focuses on understanding how labor market inequalities develop and erode, intersections of paid and unpaid work, and the implications of changing employment relations, household dynamics, and social policy for people’s economic security and mobility.

Sophie Mathieu is the Senior program specialist at the Vanier Institute of the Family, where she is responsible for building partnerships with different organizations, researchers, advocates and policy makers with an interest on family wellbeing. Dr. Mathieu holds a PhD in sociology and she is an expert on gender inequality, Québec family policy, childcare and parental benefits. She has published numerous academic papers in French and English both nationally and internationally on the “demotherization” of care work, the transformation of the Québec childcare model and on inequality in the uptake of parental benefits in Québec. Sophie is strongly committed to the process of knowledge mobilization to wide audiences, and she has published more than 15 op-eds on childcare and parental benefits since 2020. Dr. Mathieu is a member of all three research clusters.  

Lindsey McKay is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Sociology at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. She is a feminist sociologist/political economist of care work, health and medicine. Equity is a central theme in her research and approach to teaching. 

Vanessa Watts is Mohawk and Anishinaabe Bear Clan, Six Nations of the Grand River.  She is an assistant professor of Indigenous Studies and Sociology at McMaster University, and holds the Paul R. MacPherson Chair in Indigenous Studies. Her research examines Indigenist epistemological and ontological interventions on place-based, material knowledge production. Vanessa is particularly interested in Indigenous feminisms, sociology of knowledge, Indigenous governance, and other-than-human relations as forms of Indigenous ways of knowing. Vanessa’s SSHRC Insight Development Grant for her project “An Indigenist Sociology of Knowledge: Indigenous social lives in Indigenous studies, sociology and political science (1895 and beyond).” The project interrogates over a century of representations of Indigenous peoples in sociology and political science.

Jennifer Turner is the Project Manager of this partnership project. Before stepping into this role, she worked with Andrea Doucet for six years as her Canada Research Chair Project Coordinator and assisted Andrea and the research team in securing the funding for this project. Jennifer is a mom of two young boys with a vested interest in this project as she is currently living through these care/work policies. Jennifer is hopeful that this project will inform change around parental leave policies allowing for improved access, flexibility, and a higher wage replacement, along with high quality, affordable, and inclusive childcare. 

Kim de Laat is an Assistant Professor of Organization and Human Behaviour at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto. Prior to joining the Stratford School, she completed a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Gender and the Economy, University of Toronto, and a Mitacs postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Doucet at the Vanier Institute of the Family and the Department of Sociology, Brock University.

As a sociologist of work and culture, Kim is interested in how culture and work design shape inequality in organizational and creative contexts. In addition to her work with Dr. Doucet, she has two ongoing projects concerning the unintended consequences of formal and informal social policies aimed at reducing workplace inequalities; one focuses on gendered differences in the uptake of flexible work arrangements, and the other focuses on diversity initiatives in the music industry. Her work, supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, appears in such outlets as Feminist Formations, ILR Review, Journal of Gender Studies, Poetics, Socio-Economic Review, and Work and Occupations, among others, as well as in op-eds for the Globe & Mail, and Policy Options. 

Stephanie Fearon joined York University’s Faculty of Education as the inaugural assistant professor of Black Thriving and Education. Her research draws on Black storytelling traditions to explore the ways that Black mothers and educational institutions partner to support Black student wellbeing. Stephanie uses literary and visual arts to communicate, in a structured, creative, and accessible form, insights gleaned from stories shared by Black mothers and their families. Her publications have appeared in several scholarly journals, including Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, and Journal of African American Women and Girls in Education. 

Stephanie has worked nearly fifteen years in public education systems assuming leadership positions in France, Guadeloupe, and Canada. Most recently, she was the program coordinator for the Equity, Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Team and the Model Schools for Inner Cities Department at the Toronto District School Board. In this role, Stephanie provided leadership to administrators and system leaders in implementing policies and practices that promote student academic achievement, wellbeing, and belonging in schools. 

Jennifer Adese (Otipemisiwak/Métis) is a Canada Research Chair in Métis Women, Politics, and Community and an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). She is the co-editor (with Robert Alexander Innes) of Indigenous Celebrity: Entanglements with Fame (University of Manitoba Press) and of A People and a Nation: New Directions in Contemporary Métis Studies (with Chris Andersen) from UBC Press. She is the author of a number of articles and book chapters on Métis literature, Indigenous visual sovereignty, and Indigenous-Canada relations.

Stephanie Bernstein has been a professor at the Law Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal since 2003, where she teaches national, international and comparative labour law. Her research focuses on the working conditions and legal rights of paid care workers, work-family conflict and, more generally, on the regulation of precarious work. She has participated in a number of interdisciplinary research teams engaged in collaborative and participatory research with community and union organizations. She is a member of CINBIOSE, SAGE : Équipe de recherche interdisciplinaire sur le travail Santé-Genre-Égalité and the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT).

Gordon Cleveland is Associate Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Toronto Scarborough.  He studies early learning and child care policies and their impacts on children and families. He has written extensively about these subjects in academic and popular journals, books and magazines. He has recently been a member of the Expert Panel of Early Learning and Child Care Data and Research.   In 2018, he was the main author of a widely acclaimed report to the Ontario Ministry of Education that recommended the provision of free child care services to children of preschool age as the next step to improve affordability of early education and care.  He comments frequently on public policy issues in relation to early learning and child care.

Patty Douglas is an Associate Professor of Disability Studies in the Faculty of Education at Brandon University. Her work concentrates on critical and creative approaches to education, care and disability as supported by feminist, queer, decolonial, critical post-humanist and other approaches that dislodge the (humanist) human. Douglas is Co-investigator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant Reimagining Care/Work Policies where she will be exploring disability, family, work and care. Douglas also leads Re•Storying Autism, a multimedia storytelling project challenging deficit-based stereotypes of autism. She is a former special education teacher and mother to two sons, one of whom attracted the label of autism. See www.restoryingautism.ca. @ReStorying

Ann-Zofie Duvander is Professor of Sociology at Mid University and Professor of Demography at Stockholm University. Her research interests include family policy and her main research is on parental leave use in Sweden. She has studied parental leave use for various groups of parents and changes over time. She has been involved in reform evaluations, notably the effects of the introduction of the daddy months in Sweden and in the other Nordic countries. She has also studied income trajectories in couples following childbirth. Recently she has been involved in research on economic responsibility over children after a separation.

Dr. Foster is a sociologist whose research and writing spans the sociology of work, rural sociology, political economy and historical sociology. She has drawn on both qualitative and quantitative methods to study economic issues from a sociological perspective: occupational succession in rural family businesses, farm labour, housing desires among rural and urban young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder, local economic development, the history of productivity as a statistic and a concept, generational divisions at work, young peoples’ experiences on social assistance, and youth outmigration from rural communities. She teaches the sociology of work, gender and work, social research methods, and rural sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Rural Futures for Atlantic Canada and directs the Rural Futures Research Centre.

Margaret F. (Meg) Gibson is an assistant professor in social work and social development studies at Renison University College, University of Waterloo, Canada. Her scholarship focuses on 2SLGBTQI+ parenting, disability studies, social services, and feminist research methods. Meg was the collection editor for Queering Motherhood: Narrative and Theoretical Perspectives (Demeter Press, 2014), and she is currently leading a project about neurodiversity in practice, family, and identity. She enjoys spending time with her wife, two teens, tuxedo cat, and puggle.

Dr. Eva Jewell (Ma’iingan Dodem, she/her) is Anishinaabekwe from Deshkan Ziibiing (Chippewas of the Thames First Nation) in southwestern Ontario. Her scholarship supports community-based/community-led inquiry on topics of governance, kinships, care, and reclamation amongst Anishinaabeg as well as within her First Nation. Dr. Jewell is currently an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Feminisms in the Sociology Department at Ryerson University, and an Associate Fellow at the Yellowhead Institute.

Janna Klostermann is a feminist sociologist exploring the politics of care through narrative, ethnographic and arts-based research. “What about the limits of care?” is a question central to her work. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary.

Rachel Margolis is a demographer and sociologist in the department of sociology at the University of Western Ontario. Her research focuses on how families are changing and why. Her work related to the partnership grant addresses how Canadian parental benefits policies are used differently by high and low income families, and how policies affect family stability, income, and wellbeing over time.

Melissa A. Milkie is Professor & Graduate Chair of Sociology at the University of Toronto, and President of the Work-Family Researchers Network. An author of the award-winning Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, her research centers on links among gender, work-family strains and well-being. With a unique focus on time and gendered culture, she identifies social forces linked to mothering and fathering across era and region. Current projects include analyzing paradoxes of parents’ time use; trends, ethnic variations, and cross-cultural patterns of parents’ paid and unpaid labor and leisure time; multi-level buffers of work-life conflicts, and parental strains among Syrian refugee mothers. Her research has been supported by SSHRC-Canada and the U.S.-NIH.

Lisa Pasolli is an Assistant Professor of History at Queen’s University. Her work examines the history of women, gender, social policy, and child care in 20^th century Canada. Among her publications is the book Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma: A History of British Columbia’s Social Policy (UBC Press, 2015). Her current project, which is made possible by the wonderful ECEs at her son’s unionized child care centre, explores the history of child care and taxation in postwar Canada.

Francesca Petrella is Professor of Economics at Aix-Marseille University in France, and a researcher at the Institute of Labor Economics and Industrial Sociology (LEST), where she co-leads the MA program on the management of third sector organisations. A member of several national and international research networks (including EMES, CIRIEC, RIUESS), she specializes in the social economy of France and Europe. A major focus of her work is childcare (especially in terms of governance, new public policies and instruments, and the privatization and commercialization of care).

Yue Qian is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests focus on family, gender, and demography. Her current research examines how gender intersects with family and population processes (e.g., assortative mating, divisions of labor, and parenthood) to shape individual wellbeing and social inequality in East Asia and North America. Most recently, she has been doing international research to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on work/family and mental health. Her research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Social Science & Medicine, among others.

Brooke Richardson is an Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Sociology at Brock University, lecturer in the Department of Early Childhood Studies at Ryerson University and current President of the Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario. Brooke has published and presented nationally and internationally on topics related to social policy (childcare, child welfare) and Canadian children/families. Her current work problematizes the increasing privatization of the care while exploring alternative possibilities offered through a feminist, ethics of care framework. She is currently working on two edited anthologies: Mothering on the edge: A critical examination of mothering within the child protection system (Demeter Press) and The Early Childhood Educator: Critical Conversations in Feminist Theory (Bloosmbury).

Jennifer Robson is an Associate Professor of Political Management at Kroeger College, Carleton University, where she teaches courses in public policy and research methods  Prior to joining Carleton, Jennifer worked in the Government of Canada and she spent nearly a decade in the voluntary sector holding senior roles in policy development and research. Her research has included studies of social policies such as family benefits, education savings, poverty in Canada, wealth inequality, tax policy and the financial lives of low and modest income persons.

Mary Caroline Rowan has spent the last forty years travelling and working between Inuit Nunangat and Montreal, Quebec. Her interest is in living Inuit ways of knowing and being through pedagogy and curriculum, in places where young children and families are engaged. The trail has involved working in communities with Elders, parents’ children and teachers. This work has led to the construction of child care centres, the adoption of policy, the development of organizational manuals, and the creation of curricula. It has involved teacher/parent education, the making of Inuktitut language children’s books, the assembling of learning stories and a proposal to adopt Nunangat pedagogies as strategy to think with land, snow and ice.

Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay is professor of labour economics, innovation and human resources  management at the université Téluq of the University of Québec, Canada; she has been appointed Canada Research Chair on the socio-economic challenges of the Knowledge Economy in 2002 (http://www.teluq..ca/chaireecosavoir/) and again in 2009-2016, and appointed director of a CURA (Community-University Research Alliance) on the management of social times and work-life balance in 2009 (www.teluq.ca/aruc-gats).

In recent years, she has been invited professor at Université de Paris I, Sorbonne, Université of Lille I, ofAngers, of Toulouse, of Lille I and of Lyon 3, Louvain-la-Neuve, HEC and Liège universities, in Belgium, University of social sciences of Hanoi (Vietnam) and the European School of Management.

She has published many books, amongst which a Labour Economics textbook, a Sociology of Work textbook, an Innovation textbook, three books on Working time and work-life balance issues and he  has published in various international journals.

Linda White is the RBC Chair in Economic and Public Policy and a Professor of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Her areas of research include comparative welfare states, comparative social and family policy, particularly education, early childhood education and care, and maternity and parental leave; gender and public policy; ideas, norms, and public policy development; and federalism, law and public policy.  She is the author, most recently, of Constructing Policy Change: Early Childhood Education and Care in Liberal Welfare States (UTP, 2017), among other co-authored and co-edited books.

Tricia van Rhijn (PhD, RECE) is an Associate Professor of Family Relations and Human Development in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist and Registered Early Childhood Educator whose research interests include parent-child relationships, child development, early childhood education and care, child and family well-being, family relations, and various aspects of work-life integration (as well as school-life or school-work-life integration). Much of her research focuses on policy- and practice-based considerations and applications.

Dr. Kate Bezanson, BA (Trent), MA (York), PhD (York), LLM (Osgoode Hall Law School) is Associate Dean (Faculty of Social Sciences, Brock University), Associate Professor (Sociology, Brock University), Faculty Research Fellow at the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) at the Rotman School of Management (University of Toronto), faculty affiliate with the MA in Critical Sociology and the MA in Social Justice and Equity Studies programmes (Brock University), and is associated graduate faculty in the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Wilfrid Laurier University). She works in the areas of social and family policy, gender, social reproduction/care, constitutional law, political economy, and federalism.

Dr. Adrienne Davidson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. She studies public policy with a focus on social policy (including early childhood education and public schooling), Indigenous-state relations, and the political dynamics of federal systems. 

Dr. Davidson earned her PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. She was also previously a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Center for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and the Skelton-Clark Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s University. Her work has been published in the Journal of Behavioural Public Policy, Regional & Federal Studies, Canadian Journal of Political Science, and Public Policy & Administration, among others. 

Marian Baird is Professor of Gender and Employment Relations, a Presiding Pro-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, Head of the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies, and Co-Director of the Women and Work Research Group at the University of Sydney Business School. Marian was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016 for outstanding services to improving the quality of women’s working lives and for contributions to tertiary education. She is one of Australia’s leading researchers in the fields of women, work and family.

Marian’s research was instrumental in the development of Australia’s paid parental leave scheme, introduced in 2010, and she was a Chief Investigator on the review panel of the scheme from 2010 to 2014. She has contributed to a number of government enquiries relating to parental leave, gender equality and sexual harassment in the workplace. She is now Co-Convenor of the International Parental leave Network and is currently a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence on Population Ageing Research (CEPAR), where her focus is on mature workers, particularly with regard to women and care.

Morna Ballantyne is the Executive Director of Child Care Now, Canada’s national child care advocacy organization. Now a grandmother, she began advocating forty years ago for more high quality, affordable, inclusive, affordable licensed child care. She works with others to press governments to build a publicly managed and publicly funded Canada-wide system of early learning and child care. Morna serves on the Government of Canada’s Task Force on Women in the Economy, and was a member of the federal Expert Panel on Early Learning and Child Care Data and Research until it completed its mandate.

Shellie Bird is a mother and grandmother and came into childcare advocacy by serving on the Board of Directors of her son’s childcare centre.

Shellie was an early childhood educator for more than twenty years working with infants and toddlers attending Centretown Parent’s Day, a non-profit centre in downtown Ottawa.Shellie became active in her union as an advocate for early learning and childcare and has led numerous campaigns to improve the working conditions of early childhood educators. Today she works for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers as the National Child Care Coordinator and is a sitting member of the National Child Care Working Group of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and as a board member of Child Care Now.

Mareike Bünning is Senior Researcher at the German Center of Gerontology. Her research focuses on inequalities in the division of paid and care work and its consequences for the careers, family lives and well-being of caregivers. She is particularly interested in how work-family policies at the national and workplace level shape these relationships. Her dissertation titled “Parental leave for fathers – Consequences for men’s work and family lives” received the “Best Dissertation of the Year”-Award from the European Consortium for Sociological Research.

Leanne Findlay is a Principal Researcher with Statistics Canada. Her areas of expertise are population health data and healthy child development, with a specific interest in the health of vulnerable children and youth. She is also interested in mental health and correlates of positive mental health. Recently, Leanne has been involved in an extensive program of research on early learning and child care, with an emphasis on new data sources to address research gaps and to inform ELCC policy initiatives.

Margo Greenwood, Academic Leader of the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health, is an Indigenous scholar of Cree ancestry. She is also Vice-President of Indigenous Health for the Northern Health Authority in British Columbia and Professor in both the First Nations Studies and Education programs at the University of Northern British Columbia.  Her academic work crosses disciplines and sectors, and focuses on the health and well-being of Indigenous children and families and public health.  Margo has undertaken work with UNICEF, the United Nations, the CCSDH, PHN of Canada, and the CIHR, specifically, the Institute of Population and Public Health.

Lena hipp is the head of the research group “Work & Care” at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (Germany) and professor of social stratification (esp. work and organizations) at the University of Potsdam. She received her PhD at Cornell University back in 2011. Before entering academia, she worked as a policy advisor in the German Parliament. Her current research focuses particularly on social inequality related to care and gender and has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, European Review of Sociology, and Work and Occupations.

Canadian independent filmmaker Helene Klodawsky is a passionate storyteller committed to portraying political and social struggles, as well as exploring the documentary art form. Her award winning films, spanning 35 years, are screened, studied and televised around the world. Helene also works as a script consultant, especially with emerging filmmakers.Among Helene’s numerous films, Motherland (1994), Family Motel (2007), Come Worry With Us! (2013), Grassroots in Dry Lands (2015), From Janet With Love (2017), Care Rebels (2017), and The Invisible Everywhere (2019) explore how the work of care is both essential and unrecognized. Helene is in pre-production as director/writer of Stolen Time, a feature documentary on nursing home negligence.

Dr. Dafna Kohen is Assistant Director at the Health Analysis Division at Statistics Canada and Adjunct Professor at the Dept. of Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Kohen received her training as a developmental psychologist from Columbia University, McMaster, and McGill and held a position previously at UBC. Research areas of expertise include the use of survey and administrative data for policy relevant research related to children, youth, families, and vulnerable populations.

David Macdonald is a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.  Since 2008, he has coordinated the Alternative Federal Budget, which takes a fresh look at the federal budget from a progressive perspective. David has also written on a variety of topics, from income supports during the pandemic to federal tax policy, and he is a regular media commentator on national policy issues.

Rianne Mahon is distinguished research professor with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. She has published numerous articles and chapters on industrial policy, labour market restructuring, childcare politics, and the redesign of social policy at the local, national and global scales. Mahon has co-edited numerous books including After 08: Social Policy and the Global Financial Crisis (with G. Boychuk and S. McBride), Achieving the Social Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges (with S. Horton and S. Dalby), and co-authored Advanced Introduction to Social Policy (with D. Béland). Her current work focuses on the gendering of global governance, with a particular focus on transnational care chains.

Peter Moss is Emeritus Professor of Early Childhood Provision at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education, University College London. His interests include early childhood education and care; the workforce in children’s services; the relationship between care, gender and employment; social pedagogy; and democracy in children’s services. Much of his work over the last 25 years has been cross-national, in particular in Europe. He is co-founder of the International Network on Leave Policies and Research and co-editor of the network’s annual review of leave policies. Recent books include: Neoliberalism and Early Childhood Education (co-authored with Guy Roberts-Holmes); Transforming Early Childhood in England (co-edited with Claire Cameron); Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia (co-edited with a working group from Reggio Emilia); and Alternative Narratives in Early Childhood: an introduction for Students and Practitioners.

Margaret O’Brien is Professor of Child and Family Policy at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, University College London. She is a leading expert on fathers, parental leave and family life with a work-family policy focus. She has recently finished an EU funded project examining inequalities in access to parental leave across the EU-28

A current ESRC project examines COVID-19 recovery, resources and work-care strategies of parents with a child <5years in London. With Prof Ann-Zofie Duvander (University of Stockholm) she was the co-coordinator (2016-2021) of the International Network on Leave Policies and Research, a 45 country infrastructure project.

Dr. Kate Paterson is a queer educational consultant based in Calgary, Alberta. She holds a PhD in Educational Studies from the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in Social Justice and Equity Studies from Brock University. Her work focuses on the intersections of disability theory, decolonial theories, queer, trans, anti-racist and abolitionist perspectives in elementary education. Kate’s expertise is in educational policy and the broader queer/trans necropolitical landscape of public education schooling systems. As a consultant, Kate works with schools and organizations to develop queer and trans affirming practices and competencies. For more information, visit www.kepaterson.com.

Katherine Scott serves as the director for the CCPA’s gender equality and public policy work. She has worked in the community sector as a researcher, writer and advocate over the past 25 years, writing on a range of issues from social policy to inequality to funding for nonprofits. She served as Vice President of Research at the Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD) for several years and has worked with several national organizations such as Prosper Canada, Volunteer Canada, Capacity Canada, Pathways to Education Canada, and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. Katherine is currently working on projects that track the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women and their future economic security.

Vicky Smallman is the National Director of the Human Rights Department for the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). A long-time activist on gender equality and human rights issues, Vicky spent more than a decade in the academic labour movement, working primarily with contract academic staff, before joining the CLC in 2010.  She leads a team responsible for the labour movement’s policy, advocacy and campaign work on women’s and human rights, anti-racism, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, Indigenous and disability justice. Vicky has served on the boards of directors of a number of national and Ottawa organizations, including Equal Voice, Child Care Now, and the Somerset West Community Health Centre.  She currently sits on the federal Minister for Women and Gender Equality’s Advisory Council on the Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender‑Based Violence, and is a Community Research Associate at Western University’s Centre for Research and Education on Violence against Women and Children. She has researched and written about academic labour issues, activism and women in Canadian politics.

Armine Yalnizyan is the Atkinson Foundation’s Fellow on the Future of Workers. She served as Senior Economic Policy Advisor for the Deputy Minister at Employment and Social Development Canada from 2018 to 2019, and currently serves on Ministers Freeland and Fortier’s Task Group on Women In The Economy. She helped lead the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Inequality Project from 2008 to 2017, and provided weekly business commentaries on CBC radio and CBC TV from 2011 to 2018. She is past President of the Canadian Association for Business Economics.

Beginning in 2018, Jessica Falk has participated in two projects on Indigenous practices of care work and paid work with Dr. Eva Jewell, Dr. Doucet, and the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre. She will build on this research background in this Partnership research program. Jessica earned her Master of Arts in Social Justice and Equity Studies at Brock University. Her research focused on Canadian nationalism, masculinity, and racism in Canadian hockey culture. She carried this expertise forward and recently completed her Master of Science in Education at Niagara University.

Leanna Katz is a doctoral student at McGill University Faculty of Law, an O’Brien Graduate Fellow at the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow. Her research interests include labour and employment law, social welfare law, contract law, administrative law, and critical and feminist legal theory. 

Leanna’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy, the Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues, and the Commonwealth Judicial Journal.

Leanna previously clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada and the Court of Appeal for British Columbia, and was a litigator at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. She earned an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, a J.D. from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, and B.A.Sc. from McMaster University’s Arts and Science Program.

Golda Lewin is a parent of two young children and is studying at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Education. Having worked in the field of early childhood education for many years, she has become especially sensitive to the variety of working conditions experienced by child care professionals. Golda is currently intrigued by the ethical tensions and possibilities that emerge when investigating ‘quality’ in early childhood from the perspective of labour rights and relations. She is delighted to contribute to this vital project as a Research Associate. 

Elizabeth is a Research Fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC), UNSW Sydney, Australia. She has expertise in comparative care and family policy including: early childhood education and care (ECEC), the social and political economy of formal and informal care, and gender, migration and care. She is interested in how policy systems and programs interact and impact the lives and decisions of families and different demographic groups.

Sadie K. Goddard-Durant is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology at Brock University and the Director of the Office of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (OEDI) at Durham College. In collaboration with the College campus community, and through consultation with community-based stakeholders, Sadie provides strategic guidance and oversight of the delivery and evaluation of the College’s programs, and policies related to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging;  Human Rights; & Sexual Violence.

bridget (she/her) earned her Master of Arts in Sociology at the University of Waterloo in 2020. Her thesis explored LGBTQIA+ folks’ experiences of mental illness and access to support services, and her general research interests include health studies, qualitative methods, and critical theory. bridget has worked with Dr. Meg Gibson on a project about neurodiversity for the past two years and is excited to focus on queer families and families with disabilities in the Care/Work project. She enjoys spending time bouldering and camping with her partner and toy fox terrier.

Henry Stine is an MA student in Sociology at Dalhousie University. He completed his undergraduate degree at Quest University Canada, where he became interested in pursuing sociology. Henry has work experience in early education, social research, public health, architecture, and building. Henry has also worked as a teaching assistant in the Sociology department at Dalhousie and is currently writing his MA thesis on the United Nations and its commitments to sustainable development.

Marco Sasso holds a Bachelor of Journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University and has been working in the media industry as a producer and editor since 2014. Currently, he is completing his Master of Arts in Critical Sociology at Brock University. His research interests include gender, masculinities, and social policy. He is also currently a member of the RC/W project’s media outputs team.

Brianna is a Registered Social Worker currently working in mental health. She is currently completing her Master’s of Social Work (MSW) at the University of Waterloo and holds an (Hon.) Bachelor’s Social Work & Disability Studies. Her research interests include the mental and sexual health, lived experiences, and identities of people with disabilities.

Grace Caya is completing her Master of Science in Family Relations and Human Development at the University of Guelph.  Her Masters’s research examines the experience that parents with children with Autism Spectrum disorder (ASD) have when accessing resources and services and considers the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Grace is passionate about inclusion work, child development, and family relationships. 

Laura Fisher is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, a graduate of the Master of Arts in Sociology program at Acadia University, as well as a Bachelor of Community Development (Honours) graduate. Her research has spanned topics from welfare reform to family food insecurity to rural families coping during COVID-19, with a strong focus on low-income families. She is also a co-author for the past 3 years of the annual Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Nova Scotia. She is the 2021 recipient of the Outstanding Master of Arts Research Award from Acadia University.

Umay Kader is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Umay completed her bachelor’s degree in Political Science at Bilkent University, and master’s degree in Social Policy at ODTU, Ankara, Türkiye. Her research interests have spanned from welfare state policies focusing on gender, family, and single mothers to food insecurity experienced by families living in Vancouver. Umay also worked at think tanks and NGOs where she had the opportunity to collaborate with local and international stakeholders focusing on improving the lives of refugees. Her dissertation, supervised by Dr. Sylvia Fuller and Dr. Michela Musto, aims to explore and explain the experiences and meaning-making processes of young adults who are currently living with their parent(s) in Metro Vancouver.

Jenna (they/them) holds an Hons. Bachelor of Social Work degree from Lakehead University has been working in the social service field for the past nine years in the areas of mental health, disability, social assistance, and community health.  Currently, they are completing their Masters of Social Work (MSW) degree through University of Waterloo. Jenna’s research interests include 2SLGBTQIA+ families, poverty reduction, body liberation, and community organizing.  They enjoy spending time with their child and participating in community activism in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples (Niagara, ON). 

Michael is an MA student in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University, having recently completed his BA (Hons.) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Mount Allison University. His research interests include Canadian politics, fiscal federalism, and Indigenous-state relations. Michael is acting as a Research Assistant for Dr. Linda White (University of Toronto) and Dr. Adrienne Davidson (McMaster University) on a project looking at early childhood education and care in Australia, Canada, and Germany. Specifically, his work revolves around the Australian case. 

Marlene is a 2^nd year PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, specializing in International Relations and Public Policy. Her research interests include social and environmental policymaking for issues such as child care and school choice (with a focus on Germany), climate justice, and urban resilience. Her dissertation will look at the power, authority, and impact of transnational climate advocacy groups. For previous degrees, she studied political science at the University of Amsterdam, the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich as well as the Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat.

Sara Fehr is a Master’s student at the University of Manitoba, in the Department of Sociology. Their current research focuses on equity, gender, and care; their undergraduate thesis focused on Universal Basic Income from a feminist perspective. Having past experience in both academic research and the public sector, equitable and community-centred policy is central to Sara’s work.

Michele Martin is completing her Master’s of Social Work through the University of Waterloo and holds a Bachelor’s of Social Work through the University of Victoria. She currently works as a Registered Social Worker in Long-Term Care. This work, in combination with past experiences in education and care work, has led to an interest in critical disability theory, the experiences of those with disabilities in care facilities, and the policy that informs the care provided there. She is thrilled to be working with Dr. Meg Gibson and her team, contributing to the Care/Work Portrait project.

Jenna Quelch is PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto with a Collaborative Specialization in Public Health Policy from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the politics of parenthood and reproduction with an interest in policy variation and inequities across provinces and territories. She holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Simon Fraser University, where she studied the impacts of BC’s in vitro fertilization policy and patient-level perspectives on access to fertility treatments. She has been awarded the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and the RBC Graduate Fellowship in Public and Economic Policy and she is thrilled to be working in collaboration with the RC/W Project to better understand the evolution of childcare in Canada.

Kyra Menezes is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto. She is completing a double major in Ethics, Society, and Law and Peace, Conflict, and Justice with a minor in Philosophy. She is currently working on an independent research project on mothering through violence in Latin America at Trinity College. She has previously conducted research in the fields of public health policy and consumer behavioural patterns under the G20 Research Group and Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman. She has been awarded the University of Toronto National Scholarship and the University Health Network Academic Achievement Scholarship to support her in her academic and research pursuits. She is delighted to work with the Reimagining Care/Work Policies SSHRC Partnership Project to better understand the impacts of COVID-19 school closures on parents.

Jonathon Zimmer is a PhD candidate with the Department of History at Queen’s University, pursuing his doctorate under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Pasolli. Originally from the Peace Region of British Columbia, Jonathon began studying in his hometown of Fort St. John, where, at the age of 14, in 2014, he became enrolled at Northern Lights College. Since then, his educational pursuits have taken him across Canada, from acquiring a BA in History at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops to completing his MA at the University of Regina. His current interests involve a broad range of topics in 20^th-century Canadian History. 

Manlin (Monica) Cai is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests center around family, gender, and immigration in China and Canada. She is particularly interested in how gender intersects with family dynamics under the broader social, cultural, and institutional contexts. She works with Prof. Sylvia Fuller and Prof. Yue Qian to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic affects the Canadian families in the labor market and how these effects may inform family policies.

Megan Coghill (BASc., RECE) is completing her Master of Science in Family Relations and Human Development at the University of Guelph. Her research interests include early childhood education, nature-based pedagogy, observational methods, and student parents. Megan is conducting a scoping review about the institutional and jurisdictional policies and practices that impact student parents who are enrolled in post-secondary institutions in Canada. The scoping review will address the barriers that student parents face, available supports, and the unique strengths of student parents and their families.

Alyssa Gerhardt is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. She specializes in economic sociology, studying personal debt in Atlantic Canada using a mixed-method approach. Alyssa has been involved in several different projects with the Rural Futures Research Centre at Dalhousie, including a regional study on work, income, and community. Recently she co-authored Canada’s Food Price Report 2021, a national report that forecasts food prices and examines food trends. Alyssa is a recipient of the Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship and the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Trina McKellep is working on a Master of Arts degree at the University of Manitoba in the Sociology and Criminology department. Growing up and working in Northern Manitoba instilled a sense of community and underpins her research interests with Indigenous communities. Her educational and work experiences are social justice oriented, working for organizations such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Kanikanichik, and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. She hopes to continue to work with organizations that fight for both social justice and meaningful climate change.

Rachel McLay is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. As a research associate with the Rural Futures Research Centre, she has conducted and analyzed several surveys on political, socio-cultural, and environmental change in Atlantic Canada. She has also studied the experiences of childhood immigrants and refugees for the Child and Youth Refugee Research Coalition. An advocate for public sociology, she does research and writing that engages with public audiences and aims to influence policymakers. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research is focused on political culture and change in Atlantic Canada.

Siqi (Rebecca) Qin is a M.A. student at the Department of Sociology at University of British Columbia. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests centre around health, gender, and social inequality. Her dissertation investigates the patient-therapist relationship in mental health services in China. As a research assistant to Dr. Sylvia Fuller, she assisted in the making and piloting of the Familydemic Questionnaire.

Kenya is a PhD student in York University’s Department of Politics, having recently completed her MA at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy. Her research interests include the politics of caregiving, everyday activism, and community-based research methods. Her MA research investigated care as an inherently political act, working with mothers and caregivers in Nova Scotia’s childcare deserts, to examine how they coordinate childcare and other caring needs when formal childcare options are sparse or unavailable. She plans to expand upon this project in her doctoral research, monitoring the development and implementation of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan for diverse, low-income, and rural families.

Helena Tizaa is a continuing Master of Critical Sociology student at Brock University.

She has a Honours BA in Sociology from the University of Ghana.  She is an aspiring social science researcher and hopes to  inform policy interventions through research to make a difference in the lives of people like her. Her research focuses on making a difference in the lives of marginalized people, particularly Black women. She currently works as a teaching and research assistant  in the Department of Sociology at Brock University. She has conducted research that investigates the experiences of Ghanaian women engaged in commercial sex work and has also taken part in research that investigates the experiences of marginalized international students in Canada. Her major research project, which is currently underway, examines how the Structural Adjustment Policies of the IMF and World Bank exacerbate maternal health conditions in Ghana, including malnutrition, maternal and infant morbidity and mortality in women, and hypothesize these harms as criminal.

Christina Treleaven is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests center around gender, work, care, and eldercare. Her dissertation, supervised by Dr. Sylvia Fuller, explores how young adult eldercare providers conceptualize care, and how they navigate work and care interfaces both prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kailin Rourke graduated from Brock University in 2021 with an undergraduate degree of Political Science and Sociology, with a concentration in Public Law. She has experience working in administration for Long-Term Care, and her primary focus has been the realities of health care and their interaction with policies. 

Suite à un baccalauréat en sociologie à l’Université de Montréal, je suis présentement étudiante à la maitrise en Études des populations à l’Institut national de la recherche scientifique sous la direction de Maude Pugliese. Mon projet de recherche porte sur la préparation financière à la retraite de parents ayant un enfant avec un handicap impliquant des incapacités à accomplir des tâches de la vie quotidienne et qui nécessite des soins particuliers. Je m’intéresse principalement aux inégalités économiques selon le genre et aux impacts de la division genrée des tâches au sein de l’unité parentale en fonction des rôles sociaux accordés à chacun. Au cours de mon parcours universitaire, j’ai eu la chance de travailler sur plusieurs projets stimulants concernant les inégalités de genre au sein de la famille.