{"id":66015,"date":"2020-05-25T11:27:41","date_gmt":"2020-05-25T15:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=66015"},"modified":"2020-05-26T11:07:12","modified_gmt":"2020-05-26T15:07:12","slug":"canada-research-chair-andrea-doucet-receives-2-5-million-sshrc-grant-to-study-policies-impacting-diverse-canadian-families","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2020\/05\/canada-research-chair-andrea-doucet-receives-2-5-million-sshrc-grant-to-study-policies-impacting-diverse-canadian-families\/","title":{"rendered":"Brock-led research team gets $2.5-million SSHRC grant to study policies impacting diverse Canadian families"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Parents working from home while caring for children or struggling to support their families while facing a job loss are challenges that have become achingly familiar to many Canadians.<\/p>\n<p>COVID-19 has shone a spotlight on services and policies that support, or constrain, parents as they care for and provide for their families, an area Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care Andrea Doucet has been researching for decades.<\/p>\n<p>With a $2.5 million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Brock University professor will be heading an international team of researchers to study how childcare services, parental leave policies and employment policies impact diverse Canadian families.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Sb2XUvzvH-w\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The seven-year research program, \u201cWhat is the Best Policy Mix for Diverse Canadian Families with Young Children? Re-imagining Family Polices,\u201d will explore four key questions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How are current Canadian childcare, parental leave and employment policies structured, financed and delivered, and what can we learn from national and international research?<\/li>\n<li>What impacts do Canadian policies have on how diverse families live, work and care for their children and what can we learn from their lived experiences?<\/li>\n<li>What approaches and data are needed to measure the effectiveness and inclusiveness of these family policies?<\/li>\n<li>What is the best policy mix for Canada\u2019s diverse families with young children?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u201cThis partnership aims to create cutting edge and accessible knowledges about these three key family policies in Canada: childcare services, parental leave policies and employment policies,\u201d said Doucet, Professor of Sociology and Women\u2019s and Gender Studies at Brock.<\/p>\n<p>The team will also develop innovative approaches to assess and measure \u201chow these policies are designed for \u2014 and experienced by \u2014 diverse Canadian families,\u201d including Indigenous, racialized, newcomer, single parent, LGBTQI2S and low-income families.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis research program was developed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,\u201d Doucet said. \u201cAt that time, the development of inclusive care-work policies were deemed as urgent, in the midst of a socio-political epoch marked by \u2018care crises\u2019 and rising employment precarity, which have profoundly altered how people live, work and care for significant others, especially young children.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Doucet said the team\u2019s project is even more relevant with the arrival of COVID-19.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe pandemic has revealed how intertwined our working and caring lives are; how important and \u2018essential\u2019 care services and care workers are,\u201d she said. \u201cChildcare has emerged as one of the critical issues to economic recovery in Canada and in many other countries.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Doucet notes that parental leave benefits, which are already marked by social class differences outside of Qu\u00e9bec, may have to be re-envisioned in a post-pandemic world, which will be a focus for Doucet and team members with expertise in parental leave and employment policies.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPre-pandemic, we acknowledged that there was a widening gap between families who had, and families who did not have, access to affordable childcare services, leave benefits and workplace supports,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn this COVID-19 context, we are now asking: What will the \u2018new normal\u2019 be for families\u2019 work and care lives? Who is struggling, and in what ways, and what are possible long-term consequences for families \u2014\u00a0and for mothers and fathers? And could this pandemic, in spite of all that\u2019s negative, actually generate a reimagining of care and work policies in ways that support sustainable and habitable family lives?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>With Doucet as Principal Investigator, the research team is made up of 53 people (29 co-investigators and 24 collaborators), including Brock\u2019s Kate Bezanson, Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of Social Sciences, as one of the co-investigators. It also includes 34 partners from Canadian universities, non-profit organizations, international organizations, government departments, unions and a private sector company.<\/p>\n<p>The team\u2019s lead community partner is the Childcare Research and Resource Unit led by co-investigator Martha Friendly, \u201cwho has championed childcare for nearly a half century,\u201d said Doucet. In addition to Doucet and Friendly, the co-founders of the partnership are Donna Lero (University of Guelph) and Susan Prentice (University of Manitoba). Doucet\u2019s Canada Research Chair (CRC) Project Coordinator, Jennifer Turner, will take on the role of Project Manager.<\/p>\n<p>The interdisciplinary research team includes four of Doucet\u2019s current or former postdoctoral fellows: Sadie Goddard-Durant and Sophie Mathieu (Brock), Lindsey McKay (Thompson Rivers University) and Eva Jewell (Ryerson University), as well as one former PhD student, Karen Foster (Dalhousie University). The project will train more than 70 undergraduate and graduate students and several postdoctoral fellows.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis will be Canada\u2019s first large scale research initiative to produce an integrative analysis of family policies, their intra-actions and intersectional impacts, and recommendations for reimagined approaches,\u201d said Doucet.<\/p>\n<p>Vice-President, Research Tim Kenyon said the SSHRC award amplifies Doucet\u2019s international reputation as being an expert in parental leave and care-work policies, as well her contributions to methodological, epistemological and conceptual debates on how to do research on and with diverse families.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe project is the culmination of three years of research consultations building upon three decades of team research and advocacy on childcare, and a decade of collaboration on parental leave and employment policies,\u201d Kenyon said.\u00a0\u201cWith Doucet\u2019s leadership, this research will contribute to Canadian policies that will support Canadian families\u2019 caring and working lives, ultimately resulting in a stronger and more just society.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The seven-year project is being funded by SSHRC\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca\/about-au_sujet\/partnerships-partenariats\/partnership_grants-bourses_partenariats-eng.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Partnership Grant<\/a> program which supports formal partnerships between academic researchers and a range of community, non-profit, public sector, and private sector partners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Parents working from home while caring for children or struggling to support their families while facing a job loss are challenges that have become achingly familiar to many Canadians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":54396,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,3319,1,4,5,38],"tags":[6398,423,9028,3325,2468,2196,33,82,1426],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66015"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66058,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66015\/revisions\/66058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}