Daiva Stasiulis wins award for Negotiating Citizenship

The Centre for Equity in Health and Society (CEHS) has honoured Daiva Stasiulis, a professor within the Department of Sociology and Anthropology with the Wilson Head Research Award for her book Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System.

CEHS awarded the prize in part because of its analysis of the experiences of women of colour nurses. Stasiulis shares the award with her co-author, Abigail Bakan of Queen’s University.

Negotiating Citizenship examines the experiences of migrant women from the West Indies and the Philippines who come to Canada as live-in caregivers and as nurses. These migrant women struggle to win basic citizenship rights and to combat racism.

The book illuminates the transnational character of migrant women’s lives — their labour strategies, family households, sense of community, and political practices, and challenges traditional theories of citizenship, which base citizenship on membership defined in narrow national terms, or insist that the nation-state is no longer determinant.

“I feel really honoured because I knew Wilson Head personally. He was such an inspirational anti-racist and civil liberties activist,” said Stasiulis. “We also hoped that our book would be read by community and social justice activists and could contribute to the reform of exclusionary immigration laws in Canada to which poor women from developing countries are subjected.”

Dr. Wilson Head was a sociologist and a pioneer in the systematic study of racism in Canadian nursing. The Wilson Head Research Award is presented to an individual who has contributed to the scholarly documentation and understanding of racism in Canadian nursing.