Date: March 3, 2022
Time: 4pm
Title: Feminist Political Economy; A promising approach to Public Sociology
Format/Venue: Virtual
Dr. Pat Armstrong is a Distinguished Research Professor in Sociology at York University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She has held a Canada Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institute of Health Research Chair in Health Services. Among her awards are the Ontario Health Coalition’s Ethel Meade Award for Excellence in Research in the Public Interest, YWCA Toronto’s Woman of Distinction Award, The Canadian Federation of Nurses’ Unions Bread and Roses Award and York University's Faculty of Graduate Studies Postdoctoral Supervisor of the Year Award. She is a prolific academic and tireless public intellectual who has done most of her research working with unions and community organizations. Focusing on the fields of social policy, of women, work and the health and social services, she has published widely, co-authoring and co-editing such books as Wash, Wear and Care; Clothes and Laundry in Nursing Homes, The Privatization of Care: The Case of Nursing Homes, Creative Teamwork: Developing Rapid Site-Switching Ethnography, Troubling Care: Critical Perspectives on Research and Practices; Shaping Academe for the Public Good; Women’s Health: Intersections of Research, Policy and Practice; Critical to Care: the Invisible Women in Health Services and Wasting Away; The Undermining of Canadian Health Care. She was Chair of Women and Health Care Reform, a group funded for more than a decade by Health Canada and was acting director of the National Network for Environments and Women’s Health. She has served as both Chair of the Department of Sociology at York and Director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton. Prof. Armstrong is also a board member of the Canadian Health Coalition and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. In addition, she has served as an expert witness in more than a dozen cases, heard before bodies ranging from the Federal Court to federal Human Rights Tribunals on issues related to women’s health care work and to pay equity. She has been a co-investigator and principal investigator on a large number of grants, primarily focused on women’s work, women’s health, and health care. She recently wound up her 10-year Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded study "Reimagining Long-term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices" and a CIHR funded one "Healthy Aging in Residential Places". She currently holds two SSHRC ones; “Unpaid Work in Public Places” and Families and COVID.