Congratulations to Professor Patricia Landolt, who recently received a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant. The grant provides support to develop research and to design and test new partnership approaches within areas of social sciences and humanities. With this grant, Professor Landolt will study how precarious noncitizenship affects the experience of migrants in Canada. She will pursue this project with Co-applicants Professor Luin Goldring of York University and Assistant Professor Min Sook Lee, an award winning filmmaker from OCAD University. Her team will also collaborate extensively with six community organizations that interact regularly with precarious noncitizens.
In this project, Professor Landolt and her team build on the concept of "Precarious Noncitizenship" which Landolt and Goldring have written about in their previous work. Their research discovered that whether they enter on temporary work visas, student visas, tourist visas, as family dependents or as asylum seekers, many migrants in Canada spend an indeterminate amount of time in a state of immigration status precarity. While some eventually become permanent residents, others churn through temporary and unauthorized statuses. Thus, although envisioned by official policy as short-term, precarious immigration status is increasingly becoming a form of or path to de facto settlement in Canada, with precarious-status migrants living in economic vulnerability with limited access to social services and citizenship rights. As such, immigration status has the potential to become a primary fault line of social stratification in Canada, intersecting significantly with racialization, gender, and age.
The three-year Partnership Development Grant will use a community-engaged action research framework to examine how immigration status precarity is transforming experiences of work, social citizenship and belonging in ways that impact society as a whole. Focused on the Greater Toronto Area, Landolt and colleagues will bring together peer researchers with lived-experience of immigration status precarity, community agency partners, and academic researchers to conduct three qualitative case studies of youth, seniors and working women navigating the challenges of immigration status precarity. The project will create a knowledge exchange partnership with peer-researchers and community advocates. It will also extend public knowledge of immigration precarity by hosting a town hall and producing a film on experiences of immigration status precarity. This work will build on a survey project that is already underway and funded separately through a SSHRC Insight Grant (http://cep.info.yorku.ca/ )
Professor Landolt is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough campus. Her research interests include social citizenship, politics and policy in the global city, with a focus in refugee-migrant political incorporation.