Gendered Circuits of Care in the Mobility Regime of Alberta’s Oil Sands

This article examines the gendered circuits of care found in the fly-in fly-out arrangements of resource extraction zones. In the oil sands of northeast Alberta, Canada, tens of thousands of workers commute long distance between far-flung households and local work camps for rotations of one week or more. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted from the unique vantage point of work camps, we attend to the gendered relations and identities of care that characterize the ‘stretched out’ arrangements of care between camp and home. We especially address two forms of care: those aimed at helping people cope with camp life, and those aimed at caring for households at a distance. By considering both oil workers and camp staff, we highlight the gendering of the camp/commute regime as a particular geography of social reproduction and foreground the gendered identities – including mobile masculinities – that are reproduced and re-negotiated in the process

Caregiver Policy in Canada and Experiences after the Wildfire: Perspectives of Caregivers in Fort McMurray

The main aim of this report is to inform policymakers and the public about live-in caregivers’ perspectives on the policies and procedures that affect their lives. The focus of the report is on caregivers in Fort McMurray, Alberta who are in Canada as temporary foreign workers. Results are based on two surveys: 1) a January 2016 survey of caregivers’ views of, and experiences with, current government policies and procedures (especially changes implemented in November 2014), and 2) a brief follow-up study with a sub-sample of survey participants regarding the effects of the May 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire. Issues affecting caregivers are exacerbated and exposed by the events of the fire and the oil price collaps

Community Engagement in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences: Academic Dispositions, Institutional Dilemmas

Engaged scholarship is increasingly concerned with how community engagement might be institutionalized in the contemporary university. At the same time, it must be attentive to diverse academic approaches to knowledge and to the forms of engagement associated with them. Attention to this plurality is especially important in the humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS). Based on a multi-method study conducted in the Faculty of Arts at a large western Canadian research university, this paper maps the demographic positions (gender, rank, and discipline) and scholarly dispositions (stances adopted toward the production of knowledge and the role of the academic) of HASS faculty and contract instructors onto the range of ways they perceive and practice engagement. Against this backdrop, we present a qualitative case study of two pairs of faculty that fleshes out the complexities and possibilities of divergent dispositions and the forms and experiences of engagement with which they are associated. We assert that understanding differentiated starting points to knowledge production among HASS academics is an important pathway to the fuller recognition and flexible institutionalization of engagement in research universities.  Â

Live-in Caregivers in Fort McMurray: a Socioeconomic Footprint

This report looks at live-in caregivers (foreign nationals living in Canadian homes and employed to provide child or adult care) in the context of the oil sands region of northern Alberta. The report illuminates the importance of paid caregivers to the ability of the local workforce to keep up with the demands of employment and family, and examines caregivers’ work experiences, life plans, and views on Canada’s immigration policies