Pandemic Perspectives: Racialized and Gendered Experiences of Refugee and Immigrant Families in Canada

Abstract

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 deepseated 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