Belinda Leach

I studied social anthropology at Carleton University (BA 1984) and the University of Toronto (MA 1985, Ph.D. 1992) and came to the University of Guelph in 1993. I am interested in how forms of inequality are produced and reproduced socially and culturally through historical practices and changes in livelihoods in restructuring economies at the turn of the 21st century. My research has looked at the implications of shifts in the organization of work, such as the expansion of home-based industrial work and the contraction of unionized industrial work in rural and urban Ontario, and how families and individuals apprehend, accommodate and resist changing work patterns.

I lead a SSHRC-funded Community-University Research Alliance, Rural Women Making Change (2005-2010) the goal of which is to assist rural women’s organizations in bringing about effective forms of change. Performed Subordination: Global Migration and New Economic Subjectivities, also funded by SSHRC (2007-2010), is a comparative ethnographic study in which I am investigating migration journeys from Trinidad and Tobago to Canada in the context of changing Canadian immigration and labour market policies.

  • Co-editor Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (from January 2010)
  • Anthropology MA program admissions coordinator (from January 2010)
  • Member of governing group for Initiative on Community Engaged Scholarship, CSAHS
Research Area(s): 
Anthropology and history; culture and class; economic restructuring; migration; gender; paid and unpaid work; women’s and feminist organizations; development; industrial homework; feminist memorializing; violence against women; rural communities; Canada and the Caribbean.
Selected Publications: 

 2008 “A clash of histories”. Focaal - European Journal of Anthropology.  51, 43-56.

2006 “Why good jobs lead to social exclusion”. Economic and Industrial Democracy27(3) 341-368.With Charlotte Yates.

2005 “Agency and the gendered imagination: Women’s actions and local culture in steelworker families” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 12(1) 1-22.

2002 Contingent Work, Disrupted Lives: Labour and Community in the New Rural Economy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. With Tony Winson.

2002 Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as Praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press. Edited with Winnie Lem.

2002 “Feminist memorializing and cultural countermemory: The case of Marianne’s Park”. Signs, Fall. With C. Bold and R. Knowles.

1999 "Transforming rural livelihoods: Gender, work and restructuring in three Ontario communities In: S. Neysmith (ed). Restructuring Caring Labour: Discourse, State Practice and Everyday Life Toronto: Oxford University Press

Email: 
bleach@uoguelph.ca
Phone: 
52699
Office Number: 
105 A MINS
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Guelph

Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1
Canada

Tel:519-824-4120 x56525
Fax:519-837-9561