Precarity Across Borders

Date: Thursday, February 12, 2026

Time: 6 PM - 8:30 PM

Location: Earl & Jennie Lohn Policy Room (7000) at SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver

About the Event:

The event is a series of presentations.

Presentations by the speakers

• Tracing Indigenous Mesoamerica through the migration of agricultural workers in rural Canada: A large segment of migrant farmworkers to Canada are Indigenous from several regions throughout Mesoamerica. However, the literature on Temporary Foreign Worker Programs for agriculture has seldom acknowledged the multiplicity of Indigenous identities and the processes of hemispheric settler-colonialism that has induced the forced labour migration and extraction in these Indigenous communities. In this presentation, Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez offers an analysis of Indigenous Mesoamerica pronouncing itself through the presence, labour, resistance, and knowledge among Indigenous migrant farmworkers in Canadian rural landscapes. She argues that a lens of Indigeneity challenges the homogenization of agricultural migrant workers and opens-up further possibilities for emancipatory cross border projects.
• Dr. Amy Krauss will discuss how Latin American feminist movements for autonomous abortion care challenge decades of neoliberal politics that have made poor and racialized women bear the state’s economic debt as if it were a problem of reproduction. She draws on ethnographic research in Mexico City’s state-funded clinics to show how welfare rights become a mechanism of moral discipline and the cross-border feminist practices of support and companionship that grow as resistance.
• Precarious employment is a reality for many workers in BC, but we have lacked detailed data to understand it. The BC Precarity Survey measures precariousness across multiple dimensions, in and beyond paid work, to analyze its prevalence and impacts on working people and their communities. In this presentation, Dr. Kendra Strauss discusses the findings from the 2023 wave of the BC Precarity Survey and talk about what these findings mean for understanding precarity and working class politics within BC and across borders.

About the Speakers:

Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez is a transnational labour scholar and community-labour organizer committed to critical sociology and decolonial theories of knowledge production that centers diverse ways of knowing and precarious workers’ experiences within the margins of the global economy. She is the co-founder of the award wining collective, Justice for Migrant Workers, J4MW that has advocated for the rights of migrant farmworkers in Canada for two decades. Her research bridges grass-roots activism with academic scholarship and through this approach Dr. Encalada Grez has extensively documented the lives of Mexican migrant farmworker women who work and forge transnational livelihoods between rural Canada and rural Mexico.
As a public sociologist, Dr. Encalada Grez has mobilized her research through various media such as documentaries and given talks in venues such as Parliament Hill, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and at the United Nations in New York. She has also worked transnationally with export-processing workers in Mexico and Central America and as lead travelling faculty teaching US university students in over 6 countries. For three semesters, she was also the Academic Director of an intensive social justice study abroad program in her city of birth, Valparaiso, Chile. Dr. Encalada Grez is driven by her immigrant working class experiences and committed to decolonializing and transformative pedagogies.

Dr. Amy Krauss is originally from a rural town outside of Ithaca, New York. Before pursuing a PhD, she studied with unemployed workers in La Matanza, Argentina who were building a community bakery and debating how to sustain a broader movement against neoliberal capitalism. After returning to the U.S., Dr. Krauss worked as a counselor in an outpatient mental health program for recently de-institutionalized people in Western Massachusetts. Both experiences led her to graduate school for anthropology with the hopes of making relationships differently than those that reproduce empire and institutional systems of carceral care. Before joining the faculty at SFU as a guest in Coast Salish territory, she held postdoctoral fellowships and teaching positions at Princeton University, University of Chicago, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dr. Kendra Strauss is a geographer and feminist political economist with teaching and research interests in the areas of labour and regulation, social reproduction, migration, urbanization, and social infrastructures. She is interested in the ways that categories of social difference shape how wage labour and unpaid work are valued and regulated, and what counts as labour. Her research has focused on pension politics and financialization, precarity and unfreedom in contemporary labour markets, and labour and urbanization.

Before coming to SFU, Dr. Strauss taught at Birkbeck College (University of London) and held posts at the University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge, where she was Director of Studies for Geography at Robinson College.

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