EN / FR
Funder: WAGE Canada
Co- Principal Investigators: Luann Good Gingrich (Professor, School of Social Work), Heidi Matthews (Assistant Professor, Osgoode), Joel Ong (Associate Professor, AMPD)
Project Description:
Creating Space is a collaborative project co-directed by seven research directors from five faculties and six Organized Research Units at York U, with 13 community partners. The project centers precarious status women’s experiences to support self-determination and accelerate systemic change to address economic insecurity, promote frontline workplace safety, and reduce systemic gender-based violence in the context of COVID-19. Adopting a feminist and inclusive model for project development and implementation, the project examined how different groups of status-insecure women envision and enact local, collaborative models of self-determination to enhance their economic and physical security; conduct policy consultation workshops on labour and immigration law and policy, and on gender-based violence.
Funded by Women and Gender Equality Canada’s Feminist Response and Recovery Fund, the project advanced a feminist response to the current impacts of COVID-19 through systemic change. When women’s status in relation to the state is precarious, they are deprived of control over their lives and work. This project worked with 13 community partners representing female temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers, Indigenous women, and undocumented frontline workers – all of whom are disproportionately vulnerable to COVID-19 infection, economic hardship, and domestic violence owing to their status precarity.
The DIGITAL ARCHIVE is a multimedia collection of 100 short video interviews with women and gender-diverse people including precarious status women. The archive aims to shift public conversations concerning the pandemic and accelerating system change for communities across Canada. When you scroll down the page, you will find a graphic recording designed by Shannon Loomer and conceptually organized into themes/threads by Myrtle Sodhi. To explore the archive, you can hover over different sections of the graphic and click through to watch video interviews from the community organizations. Please note that the archive is best accessed on a laptop or desktop, and it may help to minimize your browser.
Community Partners
Policy Workshop
FEBRUARY 20TH 2024
Our community joined us for an introduction to our analysis methodology, where we delved into the diverse materials collected for the archive. Together, we explored preliminary data analysis findings, shared insights, and discussed the policy context. Your input shaped our understanding and guided further analysis
FEBRUARY 21ST 2024
This session focused on translating insights from Day 1 into concrete policy and legal recommendations. Through participatory exercises, we creatively organized and refined our findings, ensuring they reflected the collective wisdom shared during our discussions. This led to the creation of the graphic recording.
Symposium
NOVEMBER 28TH 2024
We are so happy to have held our virtual symposium on November 28th to celebrate the creative and collaborative work of Creating Space: Precarious Status Women Leading Local Pandemic Responses. Thank you so much to all those who joined us and shared the incredible work your organizations have contributed to the project. We are grateful for the discussions we had, and we hope to continue these important conversations and work about collective power building with you all.
During the symposium, we facilitated two group activities using Padlet. The first was an activity inspired by the Migrant Resource Centre Canada’s contribution to the project, in which participants introduced themselves in relation to their positionality in Canada and during COVID-19. The second Padlet helped us conclude the session by inviting members to share the work their groups are currently involved in.
The Warp & The Weft (2025)
Myrtle Sodhi
An artist commission for the Creating Space project
Gales Gallery, York University
March 3-7 2025
Myrtle Sodhi will be exhibiting a sculpture called The Warp & The Weft, featuring “story-threads” that women and gender diverse people shared about the pandemic experiences. The stories wove in and out of each other similar to the way threads weave in and out of each other on a loom structure.
The weaving of the stories speaks to Stephanie Toliver’s quilting analogy where she explores the ways stories come together and come apart as they come up against each other. The sculpture will feature sliced images where parts of the image is separated from other images in the same photograph to reveal the individual and collective stories they tell on their own and with the other images. These images are printed on layers of heritage washi paper. There will also be archival records and images that will speak to the way stories of the present day connect to stories of the past.