About this Event
Date: Tuesday, November 17
Time: 1 PM - 2:30 PM
Location: AQ 5067, SFU Burnaby campus
Speaker: Dr. Kendra Strauss, Director, The Labour Studies Program and the SFU Morgan Centre for Labour Research
Distinguished SFU Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Things to Know:
*As of November 1, 2026, BC will no longer observe Daylight Savings Time. The start time for this event will be 1:00 PM (PCT) .
*This is a hybrid event. To access the zoom link, please register with us under 'Online Admission'.
*Refreshments will be provided on-site.
About the Event
The Understanding Precarity in BC (UP-BC) project is a community-academic research partnership exploring and analyzing multi-dimensional precarity in the province. This talk presents data and findings from the 2023 and 2025 waves of the BC Precarity Survey to illustrate the extent and impacts of precarious work arrangements and the relationships between precarity and gender, racialization, indigeneity and legal status.
From this broader context, Kendra Strauss uses labour regime theory to focus in on the impacts of the COVID 19 pandemic on the “staffing crisis” in the seniors’ care sector, long characterized by precarious employment relationships. Recent research reveals how employers, in particular for-profit firms providing publicly funded services, increasingly utilized the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) after pandemic lockdowns to recruit care aides while also hiring from the historically large pool of migrant workers on study permits, post-graduate work permits and spousal permits. Far from solving the crisis of care, these practices have instead reinforced logics of devaluation and subordination through the production of hierarchies of social difference.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Kendra Strauss is a geographer and feminist political economist with teaching and research interests in the areas of labour and regulation, social reproduction, migration, urbanization, and social infrastructures. She is interested in the ways that categories of social difference shape how wage labour and unpaid work are valued and regulated, and what counts as labour. Her research has focused on pension politics and financialization, precarity and unfreedom in contemporary labour markets, and labour and urbanization.
Before coming to SFU Struass taught at Birkbeck College (University of London) and held posts at the University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge, where she was Director of Studies for Geography at Robinson College.
Event venue & nearby stays
SFU Burnaby, 8888 University Dr, Burnaby, Canada
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