Evelyn Encalada Grez
TERM: JANUARY 2023 - AUGUST 2023
Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez (she, her, ella) is a Latinx Assistant Professor in Labour Studies and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at SFU specializing in labour migration and marginalization in the labour market based on the intersections of immigration status, race, and gender. Her current work is focussed on mobilizing research findings from a community-engaged research project she led on the systemic exclusion of internationally trained physicians from the medical profession in British Columbia at a time of chronic physician shortages. Dr. Encalada Grez is also currently conducting research on the invisible labour undertaken by community organizers who support migrant farmworkers, particularly at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when several farmworkers died in Canadian farms.
Dr. Encalada Grez is committed to critical feminist Global-South praxis and working across borders. Before her appointment at SFU, she worked as Academic Director of an intensive social justice study abroad program based in her city of birth, Valparaiso, Chile, where she taught university students from the USA to undertake ethical decolonializing community-research with marginalized and indigenous communities in both the north and south of Chile. She has also collaborated with marginalized factory workers who produce consumer-export goods and their grassroots organizations that promoted their rights throughout Central America and Mexico. As Lead Travelling Professor for the International Honours Program run by the Vermont based School for International Training, she also taught global justice issues while travelling with university students and collaborating with various communities in over six countries, such as Jordan, India, Nepal, Senegal and more.
As a community-engaged scholar and public sociologist, Dr. Encalada Grez has mobilized her migrant-labour research through various media including documentaries and given talks in venues such as Parliament Hill to Members of Parliament, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and at the United Nations-NGO division in New York. She is the co-founder of the award-winning collective, Justice for Migrant Workers (J4MW; ) that has promoted the rights of migrant farmworkers within Canada and transnationally for over 2 decades.
Dr. Encalada Grez鈥檚 scholarship and pedagogy are fueled by her own immigrant working class family鈥檚 experiences from the Global South. She is dedicated to centring precarious workers鈥 voices and knowledges to organize and effect structural change for lives and livelihoods premised on dignity, well-being, and liberation.
For more about her work see:
Faculty page: Evelyn Encalada Grez - Labour Studies - 尤物视频 (sfu.ca)