Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care

Centre for Global Social Policy

Cynthia Cranford Associate Professor, Department of Sociology University of Toronto

Professor Cynthia Cranford’s research bridges the areas of work, gender and migration. She is currently leading a large, qualitative, comparative study of in-home personal support work, that is, help with activities of daily living provided to people with disabilities or older people. Her first, SSHRC-funded project “Negotiating Quality Care and Quality Work,” placed the experiences of personal support recipients and workers in Toronto and Los Angeles within their state, local, and organizational contexts and focused on immigrant workers from various countries but mostly in the Caribbean and Latin America. The second project, funded by the SSHRC grant “Gender, Migration and the Work of Care” and in collaboration with Young Shin and Jennifer Chun, focuses on Asian Immigrant Women in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Chinese Immigrant Women in Oakland, and Korean Immigrant Women in San Jose. Together the data from these projects will allow for a comparison of workers’ migration and work histories, processes of entry into the job, conditions of work under various care models, and collective efforts to improve this occupation.