Tania Das Gupta

Anti-Black Racism in Nursing in Ontario

In Canada, racism in nursing was dramatically highlighted recently in the case of the Northwestern General Hospital in Toronto. In 1990 seven Black nurses and one Filipino nurse from the hospital filed complaints with the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC). They claimed they had been subject to racial harassment and in some cases had been fired or forced to resign as a result. After four years of hearings and deliberations, the nurses achieved a landmark settlement with the hospital.

Class Borders: Chinese and South Asian Canadian Professional Women Navigating the Labor Market*

This paper discusses some of the results of a study aimed at exploring how highly skilled professional immigrant women from China and India, two of the top source countries of immigration to Canada since 1998, learned to reorient and reshape their skills, experiences, and aspirations in order to secure employment. Drawing on Bourdieus notion of class as relational space, his differentiation of forms of capital and his concept of habitus, we explore ways in which these women mobilize the resources they have at their disposal transnationally in order to realign their class position in Canada. Issues of gender and race are also incorporated into the discussion of class.

Grandmothering at work: conversations with Sikh Punjabi grandmothers in Toronto

This article sheds light on the work of immigrant Punjabi Sikh grandmothers in the settlement of their adult immigrant children and grandchildren in Toronto. The authors demonstrate that grandmothers face a variety of challenges, but most significantly their dependence on their children, which is a result of official state sponsorship policies that maintain the invisibility of their unpaid work and their legal vulnerability. Drawing on socialist feminist literature, the concept of ‘global care chain’ and 16 life-story-style interviews, the authors highlight the agency of these grandmothers despite all odds.