Jill Hanley

Older Women and ‘Frailty’ Aged, Gendered and Embodied Resistance

The concept of ‘frailty’, as used within public health and social services, represents a powerful practice where cultural constructions, the global economic rationale of cost restriction and the biomedical focus on ageing collide as inscriptions on the bodies of older women. This article draws on complex forms of resistance witnessed within three separate studies: narrative interviews on ‘frailty’, semi-structured interviews and participant observation in community organizations with older women in Montreal and Boston. Findings reveal how older women exercise resistance in complex ways, both consciously subverting and coopting the notion of ‘frailty’ on an individual and collective level. Such resistance demonstrates the tensions between undermining dominant notions of ageing, and fulfilling prescribed gendered and age-based assumptions about older women and their bodies. The intersections and forms of older women’s resistance challenge social constructs, social expectations and what is recognized as resistance.

Nature is there; its free: urban greenspace and the social determinants of health of immigrant families.

In this article, we draw on a 2012 Montreal-based study that examined the embodied, every day practices of immigrant children and families in the context of urban greenspaces such as parks, fields, backyards, streetscapes, gardens, forests and rivers. Results suggest that activities in the natural environment serve as a protective factor in the health and well-being of this population, providing emotional and physical nourishment in the face of adversity. Using the Social Determinants of Health model adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO, 1998), we analyze how participants accessed urban nature to minimize the effects of inadequate housing, to strengthen social cohesion and reduce emotional stress. We conclude with a discussion supporting the inclusion of the natural environment in the Social Determinants of Health Model.

Sometimes you have to go under water to come up: A poetic, critical realist approach to documenting the voices of homeless immigrant women

Methodological debates concerning feminist research design tend to focus more on the process of data collection than on the process of data representation. Nevertheless, data representation is fraught with difficulties, especially in communicating research findings concerning vulnerable populations to diverse individuals and groups. How do feminist social work researchers represent the voice of the research participants to community and service organizations while simultaneously meeting the expectations of the academic or political institutions soliciting the research? In this article, we discuss how we approached this dilemma with data collected through a research study on immigrant women experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity. Guided by feminist methodological principles, we drew on the tenets of critical realist theory, integrating this analysis with poetic inquiry to reconstruct the women’s voices in the representations of research data. We discuss these modalities and provide two case examples to illustrate their application.

Found poetry – Finding home: A qualitative study of homeless immigrant women

The focus of this article is on the use of found poetry as a tool in qualitative research to examine the experience of precarious housing and homelessness among immigrant women in Montreal. Immigrant and refugee women exhibit greater risk for homelessness than women in general or male newcomers due to higher rates of poverty. Yet little is known about migrant womens experiences of homelessness and less is available from their own perspective, specifically. The article provides a context for understanding female, newcomer homelessness and summarizes the history of the found poem in a variety of disciplines with an emphasis on “social work and the arts” context. This article also details the study methodology and illustrates the process of the found poem technique with two found poems used as data representation. The found poems we present in this article reveal two of the studys key findings related to causes of homelessness: unexpected crises (tipping points) and exploitation.

Organizing for Immigrant Rights: Policy Barriers and Community Campaigns

Immigration to Canada has changed in basic ways the composition of the labor force. Over the past 40 years, a large wave of immigrants has arrived from the countries of the “Global South”. Many have arrived with high levels of education and qualifications; however, the jobs they receive are at the bottom of the labor market. The Immigrant Workers Center (IWC) in Montreal is an organization that provides individual services, education on rights, and organizes immigrant workers for workplace justice. This article describes three campaigns led by the center. They reflect the exclusion of immigrant workers from coverage in policy areas related to heath care, compensation for workplace injury, and benefits for collective lay-offs in the textile sector. The article concludes with some of the lessons learned in these campaigns.

Transnational elements of newcomer women’s housing insecurity: remittances and social networks

Navigating settlement is complex and often stressful for international migrants. Transnational networks may provide support in addressing settlement hurdles, as may settlement or other community organizations. However, elements of the migration experience, including transnational obligations (such as remittances) and transnational networks, may also be hindrances to overcoming settlement challenges. This paper is based on a larger study on housing insecurity and homelessness among newcomer migrant women in Montreal, Canada. Here, we focus on how transnational aspects of settlement shape newcomer women’s housing experiences, an understanding essential to the development of responsive services and policies. We draw on interviews with immigrant, refugee and undocumented women to illustrate the housing struggles they face, navigating transnational processes while (re)building their lives in Montreal. The paper concludes with recommendations for ways that immigrant and refugee settlement services can acknowledge and integrate these transnational considerations in order to prevent precarious housing and homelessness.

The “Regionalization” of Immigration in Quebec: Shaping Experiences of Newcomers in Small Cities and Towns

As in most Canadian provinces, the vast majority of immigrants to Quebec settle in the Greater Montreal region. Fully 85 % of immigrants to Quebec chose to live in the province’s metropolis, with Quebec City attracting a distant 5 %. Only 10 % of immigrants arriving between 2010 and 2014 chose to live anywhere but these two cities (Palardy 2015, 9). But, as in most other Canadian provinces (if not to say in many destination Western countries) (Belkhodja and Vatz Laaroussi 2012), the Quebec government has identified immigrant newcomers as a potential asset for small towns and rural areas in the province that are facing population decline, a shortage of particular types of workers and an ageing population. Yet the province remains far from its objective of attracting 21 % of new immigrants (2005–2015) to settle outside of Montreal (MIDI 2013, 10). A related outcome is that many rural and small-town communities in Quebec have today come to depend on temporary foreign workers (TFWs) as the labour force for certain industries. And, while immigration has always been a factor in rural areas and small towns, there is a growing desire to attract them to settle and strengthen local communities.

Social policy frameworks of exclusion: the challenge of protecting the social rights of ‘undocumented migrants’ in Quebec and Shanghai

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the implications of administrative ‘undocumentedness’, arguing that a lack of legal recognition across jurisdictional boundaries has parallels whether international or inter-municipal. In Canada and China, migrant workers only began receiving significant public attention in the past 20 years. Canada has had a boom in the use of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, yet tightening immigration procedures overall has led to a rise in the number of undocumented workers. While in China, most rural-to-urban migrants move without transferring their hukou residency registration. The authors argue that there are surprising parallels in the policy frameworks governing access to social rights for undocumented migrants in Quebec and in Shanghai, parallels that create social exclusion. Mutual lessons for addressing the social rights of irregular migrants are discussed.