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Faculty

Alicja K. Muszynski

PhD (U.B.C.)

MA (U.B.C.)

BA (McGill)

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Legal Studies

Office: PAS 2027

Telephone: (519) 888-4567 ext. 35187

Email: alicja@uwaterloo.ca

 

Research and Teaching Areas:

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (2011-2014) grant in the amount of $409,550 under the CIC Inter-Action Multiculturalism Grants and Contributions Program to facilitate interaction between the 26 African communities recently settled in Waterloo Region with public institutions; in particular, police/legal services and schools (elementary and junior high). The University of Waterloo is teamed with two not-for-profit grassroots organizations: WWOW (World Wide Opportunities for Women) and African Women's Alliance.

May-September 2008 -  grant for $70,000 awarded by the Ministry of the Attorney General (Ontario) under its 2007/2008 Community Hate-Crimes Response Grants Program. Working with grassroots organizations two workshops were held in Kitchener and Cambridge followed by a forum at the University of Waterloo to address the issue of hate crimes against African residents living in Waterloo Region. The Waterloo Regional Police Services was an official partner with participation from their Hate Crimes Investigation Unit.

Research interests and grants in the past have included a needs assessment involving farm women living in Ontario and Saskatchewan; involvement in a SSHRCC funded international family farms project involving Canada (Saskatchewan and Rimouski), France, Brazil, Tunisia and Poland; and participation on the SSHRCC funded Fish and Ships research project at The University of British Columbia.

Teaching areas include the following:

 

Publications:

Currently working to complete a book manuscript (Wilfrid Laurier Press) entitled "Racial Hatred in a Post Racial Canada" that applies a feminist and anti-racist analysis to investigating racial discrimination against the newly settled African communities in Waterloo Region. Research includes interviews with members from the 26 African nations who have settled in the region since the early 1990s and is directed at collecting migration histories as well as personal experiences of ethnic and racial discrimination.

Cheap Wage Labour: Race and Gender in the Fisheries of British Columbia (McGill-Queen's University Press 1996). Awarded the B.C. Regional History Prize in 1997 by the Canadian Historical Association.

Articles in refereed journals as well as chapters in refereed books include:

"Let's not All Go 'Post'-al: Towards a Genealogy of Essentialism" in Racism, Identity, and Justice: Dialogue on the Politics of Equality and Change edited by Hier and Bolaria (2009)

"Fordism at Work in Canadian Coffee Shops" in Just Labour (2011) with Julia Woodhall (Ph.D. Student whom I am supervising)

"Negotiating Female Morality: Place, ideology and Agency in the Red River Colony" in Women's History Review (2007) with Sharron FitzGerald (Ph.D. Student on whose committee I was a member).

Other publications include a history of the Kitchener-Waterloo Sexual Assault Support Center where I volunteered for six years, including three terms on the Board of Directors; social construction of sex, gender, race and class; patriarchy and gender; social stratification: class and gender inequality; crisis in family farming and the political economy of fishing in British Columbia.