Publications

Drawing on interviews with unhoused young people in Toronto, this article develops interfaces of precarity as a theoretical construct to unpack the mutually constitutive relationships between precarious work, housing, and social supports. By attending to the ways these dimensions of life collide in youth’s narratives, their dynamic, multidirectional, and spatiotemporally contingent interrelations are revealed, offering empirical insights into the ways these domains are co-produced and differentially experienced. This article also contributes to scholarship on precarity by materially grounding precarity’s relational and multiscalar character within and beyond work and housing.

In the current period, young people face multiple challenges in the labour market related to the rise of precarious work, as well as hardships tied to housing affordability, homelessness and mental health. Work integration social enterprises (WISEs) provide paid work, employment training, and a variety of wrap-around supports that help integrate young people into the work force. In this paper, we examine the ways WISEs help young people in Toronto. We explore the role they play as learning, support, and social spaces to argue that, within these sites, young people develop pathways to disrupt temporal and spatial insecurities associated with a stalled future.

The workplace is a key space where LGBTQ+ people face discrimination leading to mental health distress. This paper shows how spatial attributes of work shape experiences and perceptions of discrimination, mental health, and resilience. Our findings suggest that understanding the connection between workplace discrimination and poor mental health requires a more nuanced understanding of the workplace, highlighting how workplace stressors are simultaneously emplaced in and exceed its spatiotemporal bounds.

This study examines the relation between customer abuse and aggression, the gender and sexual expression of workers, and labour control in precarious and low-wage service work. We argue that customer abuse and aggression is a mechanism of labour control that disciplines worker behaviour and aesthetics, directly and indirectly, leading to concealment and self-policing. Management is shown to be complicit in this dynamic, placing profitability and customer satisfaction over the safety of queer and trans workers, only intervening in instances of customer abuse and aggression when it had a limited economic impact.

Previous attention to LGBTQ+ mental health and work has often focused on ensuring that workplaces are inclusive. This study reaffirms the importance of LGBTQ+ supportive workplaces while also demonstrating the role of precarious work in contributing to poor mental health. As a result, we call for extending beyond employer and union driven inclusion strategies to address both the concentration of LGBTQ+ people in precarious work and the degradation of work more broadly.