Andrea Doucet

Parental-leave rich and parental-leave poor: Inequality in Canadian labour market based leave policies:

Canada has two parental leave benefit programs for the care of a newborn or adopted child: a federal program, and, since 2006, a provincial program in Québec. Informed by a social reproduction framework, this article compares access to parental leave benefits between Québec and the rest of Canada by family income and by its two different programs. Our analysis of quantitative data reveals that maternal access to leave benefits has improved dramatically over the past decade in the province of Québec, especially for low-income households. By contrast, on average 38% of mothers in the rest of Canada are consistently excluded from maternity or parental benefits under the federal program. We argue that one key explanation for the gap in rates of access to benefits between the two programs and between families by income is difference in eligibility criteria. In Canada, parental leaves paid for by all employers and employees are unevenly supporting the social reproduction of higher earners. Our article draws attention to the need for greater public and scholarly scrutiny of social class inequality effects of parental leave policy.

The Ethics of Care and the Radical Potential of Fathers ‘Home Alone on Leave’: Care as Practice, Relational Ontology, and Social Justice

It was several decades ago that feminist, fatherhood, and family scholars began to argue that father involvement has significant generative benefits for families, for children’s development (e.g., Lamb 1981), for men (e.g., Chodorow 1978; Parke 1996), for women (Pleck 1985; Okin 1989), and for the attainment of gender equality and wider social change. In relation to the latter, gender and feminist scholars speculated that father’s enhanced participation in childrearing could reverse the metaphoric relation between “rocking the cradle and ruling the world” (Dinnerstein 1977) and could potentially inhibit “a psychology of male dominance” (Chodorow 1978, p. 214). As Sara Ruddick put it, “the most revolutionary change we can make in the institution of motherhood is to include men in every aspect of childcare” (1983, p. 89). My focus in this chapter is on father involvement as part of a larger field of gender divisions of labour, with specific attention to changes and continuities in gendered parental responsibilities and how fathers taking home alone leave, as advanced in this collection, constitutes an innovative approach to the intransigence of shifting gendered parental responsibilities. This chapter focuses on the benefits of fathers taking parental leave time alone, while also pointing to some of the challenges, inside and outside the home, for fathers who engage in primary caregiving. I also attend to several conceptual issues that underpin this field of research.

Shorelines, Seashells, and Seeds: Feminist Epistemologies, Ecological Thinking, and Relational Ontologies

This chapter provides a brief sketch of feminist epistemologies, their earlier iterations, and their contributions to relational epistemologies and methodologies, while also highlighting how they have sown the seeds for continuing feminist contributions to relational dimensions of knowledge making. It engages, through diffractive readings, with some of the work of pioneering and leading feminist epistemologist Lorraine Code and her four-decade trajectory of writing on knowledge making, subjectivities, and epistemic responsibilities, and especially her recent writing on ecological thinking. I work with Code’s metaphorical and literal ecological examples—Deleuzian ethology, a case study of Rachel Carson, and an exploration of seeds and their socio-cultural roots. I argue that these metaphors work to demonstrate how Code challenges dominant approaches to knowledge making that separate epistemology and ontology and presents ecological thinking as an alternative approach that entangles politics, ethics, epistemology, and ontology as well as knowing, being, and doing. The chapter highlights some of the methodological implications of working with ecological thinking; specifically, ecological thinking offers insights about epistemological and ontological relationality that resonates with, but also expands, current sociological methodological approaches and relational sociology. These include making shifts from reflexivity to diffraction and from interaction to intra-action; a focus on vitality and processes of becoming; and thinking through our ontological underpinnings, including what it means to work with ontological alterity and ontological multiplicities. I argue that Code’s ecological thinking approach warrants more attention within relational sociology.

Committing Sociology: Methodological and Epistemological Reflections Introduction

IN APRIL 2013, FORMER CANADIAN Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded to questions about terrorism following the Boston marathon bombings and the arrest of two men accused of a planned terrorist attack on a VIA rail train. It was a rare moment when a Canadian political leader mentioned our discipline: “I think, though, this is not a time to commit sociology, if I can use an expression” (Fitzpatrick 2013). One year later, in August 2014, Harper invoked this “expression” again when he argued that an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women was not needed because it was not a “sociological phenomenon” but, rather, a series of individual crimes (Singh 2014). In both cases, sociologists were quick to respond to Harper’s comments on “committing sociology” with Op Ed pieces (e.g., Brym and Ramos 2013; Singh 2014; Strong-Boag and Creese 2013). The Canadian Sociological Association (CSA) played an active role in facilitating these discussions through their blog, and on Facebook and Twitter; they also produced and sold a highly popular “Commit Sociology” T-shirt. The CSA also decided to create a new “Committing Sociology” section in the Canadian Review of Sociology with the intention that this would be a place for more immediate commentary and the sharing of sociological insights about topical issues. This Committing Sociology themed section is based on a panel that we organized under the auspices of the CSA Research Advisory Committee.

Ontological narrativity and the performativity of the Stories We Tell Stories We Tell

Stories We Tell, an autobiographical documentary written and directed by Canadian actress and Academy Award-nominated director Sarah Polley, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, garnered rave rev...

Introduction: Critical Feminist Sociologies of Families, Work, and Care

IN 2014, the United Nations twentieth anniversary of the International Year of the Family, there was a flourishing of conversations across the globe on family theories and policies, and challenges faced by families (e.g., the United Nations 2014). As we observed these developments on the international stage, we also reflected on the state of the sociology of the family in Canada as a field of research that seems to be waning in comparison to other areas of sociological research. We also noted how there is a strong history of feminist and critical approaches to critical sociologies of families, work, and care and how Canadian feminist sociologists have, for over three decades, reshaped the way we think, theorize, and intervene in policies and public debates about families, work, and care as well as gender, class, race, and sexualities. Keen to revive and expand upon these historical developments, we convened a keynote panel at the 2014 Canadian Sociological Association conference at Brock University that drew together an esteemed set of Canadian voices that have made foundational contributions to feminist and critical family sociologies, each of us have been deeply affected by the work of the scholars that we invited to participate in this panel: Ann Duffy (Professor of Sociology and Labour Studies, Brock University); Margrit Eichler (Professor Emerita of OISE/University of Toronto); Bonnie Fox (Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto); and Meg Luxton (Professor of Sociology and Women’s and