Supervisory committee: Dr. Leah Vosko (supervisor), Dr. Luin Goldring, Dr. Laam Hae
My dissertation examines the Working Holiday Program, a temporary migration scheme through which approximately 18,000 young people from Korea, Japan, and Taiwan migrate to Canada each year. I study how this program, often framed as a form of mobility and cultural exchange, operates in practice as a system that produces a flexible, racialized, and gendered migrant labour force. Focusing on East Asian migrant youth, particularly women, I analyze how they are incorporated into Canada’s service economy through precarious and low-wage work, while also navigating and making sense of these conditions in everyday life. I argue that dominant narratives of “working tourism” obscure the structural conditions of racialized and gendered labour precarity that shape their experiences. More broadly, my research situates these dynamics within global political-economic relations between East Asia and Canada.
I also currently work as a research assistant on the SSHRC Partnership Grants project Liberating Migrant Labour?: International Mobility Programs in Settler-Colonial Contexts.
Reading List for the Comprehensive Exam in Global Sociology (developed with the committee)