Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

The (un)changing housing experiences and dynamics of caregivers in Canada

In Canada, foreign caregivers are a group whose work revolves around making the home a place of comfort for others. Invaluable to Canada’s economy, caregivers take on gendered housework — caring for the sick and the differently abled, thereby enabling Canadians to compete effectively in the job market. To date, little is known about how these predominantly racialized women navigate Canada's unstable housing market. To fill this gap, I study the distinct realities, barriers and resources of caregivers when seeking housing through an intersectional feminist lens, and the frameworks of political economy and social network analysis. Centering the realities of this minoritized group will underscore the urgency of housing access and its connections to aspects of immigrants’ integration and wellbeing. With home described as a “shelter from storms,” this study contributes to national discourse by depicting the storms weathered by caregivers.

Desmond Oklikah
PhD candidate, Geography and Environment
Faculty of Social Science

Supervisors
Godwin Arku (https://geoenvironment.uwo.ca/people/faculty/arku_godwin.html)
Teresa Abada (https://sociology.uwo.ca/People/profiles/Abada-in-depth.html)

Desmond Ofori Oklikah is an emerging scholar and a SSHRC PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Environment. Desmond integrates intersectionality, EDI-foci and Social Network Analysis (SNA) to better understand complex issues related to immigrant housing and health, climate-induced migration and food insecurity among immigrants in North America. Desmond’s works aim to document and deconstruct the narratives and lived experiences of immigrant groups, highlighting the macro, meso and micro-related challenges that impede their successful integration into mainstream Canadian society. Desmond holds a Master of Arts in History from University of Guelph and has engaged in research at Western University, University of Cape Coast and Network for Economic and Social Trends (NEST) to highlight the realities of marginalized identities.

You can connect with Desmond on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/desmond-ofori-oklikah-6296bb149/ and via email doklikah@uwo.ca.

View Desmond's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/679/