Cynthia Cranford

Dr. Cynthia Cranford studies inequalities of gender, work and migration, and collective efforts to resist them. She has analyzed this nexus of inequalities and resistance through both in-depth, case studies of precarious migrant workers, like janitors in Los Angeles and temporary agency workers in Toronto, and analyses of insecure labour markets in Canada and the U.S. Her recent research compares the social organization of in-home personal care and support – the bodywork, emotion-work and housework that allows aging, chronically ill and disabled people to live at home – across different contexts.

Dr. Cranford’s book, Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances (2020, Cornell University Press) analyzes the dynamics that exacerbate, and alleviate, tensions between elderly and disabled people’s quest for flexible services and workers’ pursuit of security. Cranford compares four programs providing support to adults with physical disabilities and aging people across and within class and racial lines, inside and outside of families, and provided to, and by, both women and men in Toronto and Los Angeles. This qualitative analysis is based on interviews with over three hundred people, including aging and disabled people who use home care services, the workers that directly provide them and key informants from government, employers, disability advocates, and labor organizers. To support both flexible care and secure work, Cranford argues we need deeply democratic alliances to advocate for universal state funding, design culturally sensitive, labour market intermediaries to assist in finding workers and jobs, and to address everyday tensions in home-workplaces. Two Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada grants supported this book project. Home Care Fault Lines has won the following awards:

• 2022 John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award from the Canadian Sociological Association
• 2021 Errol Sharpe Book Prize
• 2021 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award, co-winner, from Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association

Dr. Cranford is also collaborating with academics and community organizations to analyze ethnic care economies, where immigrant workers provide paid and unpaid home care to elderly immigrants in the same community. We have published two papers on the first case study of publicly funded elder care in Oakland’s Chinatown in Gender, Migration and the Work of Care and in a special issue of Critical Sociology. Our other case studies focus on publicly funded home care within Los Angeles Koreatown and the crisscrossing public and private care economy organized through agencies, cooperatives and government social services within the Los Angeles Pilipinix community. We have published our first paper on the Pilipinx community in Gender & Society, and comparative analyses of homecare workers in Los Angeles and Toronto in the Research Handbook on Intersectionality and in Signs. A SSHRC partnership grant funded this research project on co-ethnic Immigrant Labour Markets for Personal Care Work.

Dr. Cranford is also engaged in research with UTM students on a project entitled “Understanding Labour Markets for Immigrant Workers in Peel Region” through the Department’s Peel Social Lab. Analyzing interviews collected by UTM students with workers from a range of countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern and Southern Europe, this qualitative study shows how multiple dynamics work together to shape the position of immigrant workers within a precarious labour market and how they navigate their place within it over time. A clear language report can be found here. 

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