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RESEARCHGlobal Migration of Care workers
I explore various aspects of the globalization of care work and the ways this knits together the restructuring of care within nation-states, transnational migration and embodiment. Care work is stratified by intersectionality, especially race, ethnicity, immigration status, gender and education. Through care work ‘local’ and transnational systems of gendered and racialized hierarchies, cultural representations and political-economic processes converge in the intimate spaces of bodies and homes as well as institutional settings. I am exploring these ideas in the context of the politics and ethics of recruiting internationally trained nurses alongside the continued devaluing of low-wage domestic workers.
Homes, Bodies and CareIn a series of papers, primarily written with Isabel Dyck (Geography, University of London, Queen Mary), I address the emergence of a neoliberal agenda for home care and on consequential discourses, practices and processes of care. Our empirical work draws from an interdisciplinary project on the home as a site of long-term care in urban and rural locations across Ontario. We investigate home care from the perspective of the paid home care workers – nurses, attendants, and personal support workers, as well as long-term care recipients and their family caregivers. Isabel and I have framed our papers around the materialities of home, risk and care ethics, embodiment and body work, masculinities and migration.
Work, Employment and Workplace DiversityThis research explores employment, home-work linkages and socio-economic change in large cities, the social and cultural dimensions of workplace dynamics and the organization of firms. One strand is driven by questions of diversity, social justice and social policy aimed at the workplace. Another strand involves the historical analysis of the constructions of urban femininities in North American white-collar workplaces in the context of social and technological change over the broad sweep of the 20th Century (this work was in collaboration with Kate Boyer, Planning and Geography, Cardiff University).
Cities and UrbanismI am a core and founding member of UW’s Cities Collaboratory (CitiesCollab), along with Susan Kemp (Social Work), Margaret O'Mara (History) and Thaisa Way (Landscape Architecture). CitiesCollab explores the dynamic of cities primarily from social science and humanities perspectives. We developed the Lake Union Laboratory (LULab), a teaching and faculty-student research project focusing on one specific place within Seattle. The teaching component of our collaboration was featured in the UW 2014 Provost’s report on technology and teaching and some of our research appears as our Curating Collaborative Urban Research in the Digital Realm hosted by UW's Simpson Center for the Humanities. In 2015 the CitiesCollab became part of the university-wide initiative Urban@UW.
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TEACHINGGeography 342: Geographies of Inequalities - Winter 2019Geography 490: The Seattle Region - Spring 2019Geography 541: Graduate Research Seminar - Feminist Geographies - Autumn 2018
GEOG 277: Geographies of Cities
This course explores the economic, cultural, social and political dynamics of cities – their location and functions; and internal structure –including economic activities, housing and social geography. Particular emphasis is placed on the US and Canadian experience, although examples will be occasionally drawn from other regions of the world. Explores economic, cultural, social and political dynamics of cities - their location, functions, and internal structure, including economic activities, housing, and social geography. Topics include economic restructuring; suburbanization and urban sprawl; urban planning; inner-city gentrification; and how issues of class, race, and gender are embedded in the geographies of cities.
GEOG 342: Geographies of Inequalities
This course considers the geographies of social, political and economic inequalities. The focus will usually be on urban areas, although other spatial scales will also be examined. The course begins with discussions of the theoretical underpinning of ‘inequality’. The remainder of the course builds on these ideas by exploring topics such as the spatial distribution of wealth and poverty, and the geographies of exclusion and discrimination in employment and housing. Particular emphasis is placed on the US and Canadian experience, although some examples are drawn from other regions of the world.
GEOG/GWSS 476: Women and the City (occasionally I teach GEOG 431: Gender and Geography)
This course explores the reciprocal relations between gender relations, the layout of cities, and the activities of urban residents. Topics include: feminist theory and geography (women, gender, and the organization of space); women and urban poverty, housing and homelessness; paid employment; geographies of childcare; and women and urban politics. Particular emphasis is placed on the US and Canadian experience, although some examples are drawn from elsewhere.
GEOG 490: The Seattle Region
Capstone experience for upper-division students with previous coursework in urban geography and social science research methods. Studies how social/cultural, political, economic historical-geographies are created, sustained, or altered in urban areas, using the Seattle area as our focus. The course has two required components. Participation and leadership in a seminar-style discussion and other activities focusing on assigned readings, and a paper and online exhibit based on independent research project on the Lake Union area. One prior advanced course in qualitative or quantitative methods or research design, and one prior urban geography or inequality course is strongly recommended (Geography 310, 331, 342, 377, 378, 431, 432, 439, 445, 476, 477, 478, 479). Geography 315 is particularly recommended.
GEOG/GWSS 541: Graduate Research Seminar: Feminist Geographies
This graduate seminar explores major research themes in feminist geographies. Particular attention is given to the concept that gendered identities and spaces are discursively (re)produced. And as recent feminist scholarship emphasizes diversity and difference, the seminar highlights the intersections between gender, ‘race,’ ethnicity, sexuality, class, and other social identities and systems of difference. A typical seminar covers the history of feminist geography since the 1970s, current debates regarding appropriate methodologies in feminist geographies, and feminist geographers’ research around questions to do with the home, gendering everyday spaces, workplaces, the body, the nation and globalization.
GEOG 577: Graduate Research Seminar: Urban Geography: Place, Inequality and Difference
This seminar addresses questions of place, urban inequality and social difference with the aim of making sense of why urban inequalities persist and how they operate in and through cities and urban spaces. The role of community activism in American cities is addressed, as is the strategic engagement with existing structures of governance and public policies, along with the ongoing efforts to transform them.
GEOG 525: Advanced Qualitative Methods (I teach this occasionally)
Examines why and how qualitative methods can be used to pursue research in geography. Includes considerations of theoretical, ethical, and political issues that arise with qualitative methods. Offers practice in various methods such as ethnography, focus groups, interviewing, discourse and content analyses, narrative analysis, and archival analysis.
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Publications - Books
Child care policy, provision and funding has not kept up with the rapid increase in mothers in paid employment. Who Will Mind the Baby? (1996) explores how working mothers negotiate their responsibilities, and contrasts the limited child care policies of the United States and Canada with the situation in Europe and Australia.Click here for more information
Edited with Kevin Ward (University of Manchester), Neoliberalization (2007) engages with theoretical concerns and empirical interrogations of the multi-dimensional and multi-scalar processes of neoliberalization through a series of spatially and substantively diverse case studies written by scholars from across the social sciences.Click here for more information.
