Pandemic Perspectives

Pandemic Perspectives: Racialized and Gendered Experiences of Refugee and Immigrant Families in Canada Pallavi Banerjee (bio) and Carieta Thomas, Special Guest Editors (bio) In Canada and across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many existing underlying inequities including racial injustices and gender-based discriminations (Banerjee, Khandelwal and Sanyal 2022; Hamilton, Esses and Walton-Roberts 2022; Özkazanç Pan and Pullen 2020). Racialized refugees and immigrant families in Canada were especially vulnerable to the marginalizing social outcomes of the pandemic (Banerjee, Chacko and Korsha 2022; Lightman 2022). For instance, during the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian and Muslim immigrants and refugees have been at an all-time high in Canada (Aziz 2022; Balintec 2022); college-educated immigrant women have experienced the highest rates of unemployment (Ferrer and Momani 2020); immigrant careworkers of colour have died at disproportionally high rates (Lightman 2022); and refugee families have experienced prolonged family separations, barriers to health care and higher rates of domestic violence (Hamilton et al. 2022). Over the last three years, scholars across disciplines have documented the deep-seated inequities that have been further exposed during the pandemic across the globe. The pandemic also exacerbated class and caste-based, gender and racial inequities. There was a rise in the gender gap in employment (Hertz, Mattes and Shook 2021), gender pay gaps among healthcare workers (WHO 2022), and domestic violence (Piquero et al. 2021). As the papers in our Special Issue will show, and as critical feminist researchers have shown over and over again, these pandemic-related inequities increased manifold when gender intersected with race. Intersectionality, as a theoretical orientation embedded in Black Feminist Thought (Collins 2002; Crenshaw 1991; Glenn 2011), provided the tools to “problematize static, homogenizing categories and analyze how power is situated within multiple shifting identities [End Page 1] and social locations” (Allison and Banerjee 2014, 70) as pandemic-related inequities surfaced. For instance, the social and economic exclusion and workplace precarity during the early days of the pandemic of a largely gendered and racialized healthcare workforce was highlighted by intersectional researchers engaged in carework research (Dill and Duffy 2022; Lightman 2022). Critical immigration and race scholars have shown the various ways that the pandemic negatively impacted immigrant and refugee communities of colour. Banerjee, Chacko and Korsha (2022) demonstrated how lockdowns were triggering war-traumatized refugee women of colour who experienced captivity and torture prior to arriving in Canada. Researchers studying Black communities during the pandemic spotlighted how the Canadian racial status quo allowed Black communities to disproportionately bear the risk of the pandemic in Canada (Mensah and Williams 2022). As also demonstrated by Sarah Munawar’s paper in this Special Issue, Manca (2021) has shown how pandemic responses to maternal healthcare adopted neoliberal, racist, and colonial interventions—like separating infants from their mothers—that disproportionately impacted low-income women of colour and normalized a white, middle-class standard of reproductive care. However, much of the scholarship, even when it adopted an intersectional perspective, ignored how the pandemic-related inequities seeped into the private and intimate realm of familial interactions, be it parenting, providing for the family or mental health concerns. Given such, and the virulent nature of the racialized and gendered impact of the pandemic on marginalized groups in Canada, it was important to curate empirical accounts framed through either critical race theory or intersectional feminist theory on the varied experiences of immigrant and refugee families during the pandemic. For the Special Issue, we invited work that critically engages how existing inequities were exacerbated during the pandemic for families of immigrants and refugees and how many of these families have resisted these marginalizing experiences. Overview of the Contributions This Special Issue includes seven articles resulting from an open call for proposals about emerging research and perspectives on the effects of COVID-19 on Canada’s immigration and refugee families. Empirical studies that center the intersections of gender and race in appraising the impact of the pandemic on immigrant and refugee families of colour (substantively and theoretically) were invited from scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Using a decolonial and intersectional feminist analysis, Bragg and Hyndman unpack the gendered and racialized conditions of work that immigrant and refugee

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Criminology · Globe · Immigration · Intersectionality · Pandemic · Political science · Racism · Refugee · Sociology · Feminism, Gender, and Intersectionality · Feminist Theory and Gender Studies · Food Security and Health in Diverse Populations · Gender Studies · Law · Medicine

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  Open Access•Milena Tekeste, Amalina Zakariah et al.•Gender Work and Organization•2024

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