Right: Thomas Klassen

The has asked Klassen to conduct research on new policies for Korea’s labour force and to share his findings with decision-makers. The institute is responsible for contributing to public policy and raising awareness of labour issues through timely and analytical research. As well, Klassen will spend several months studying Korea's retirement policies. Specifically, he will examine how the changing labour market, particularly a rapidly aging population, impacts mandatory retirement practices.

His research in Korea will also provide insights for Canada, which also has a rapid increase in older workers.

An expert on retirement policies, Klassen teaches courses on the politics of aging. He is the co-editor of (2005), the only book on mandatory retirement in Canada. Last year, Klassen co-edited with Jae-jin Yang the book .

This will not be Klassen's first working stint in South Korea. In 2006-2007, he taught at Yonsei University in Seoul and wrote about the lighter side of the experience for 91��ɫU magazine under the title .

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Doorey says the main reason he started Doorey's Workplace Law Blog was to better connect with his students. “I wanted to make my courses in workplace law and industrial relations interesting and ‘real’ for the students. By linking course theory and readings to real cases and current news events, I can build student interest in the course in ways a textbook never can.”

Right: David Doorey

But then he thought he could do that even better through an app. “The iTunes app is the next step,” he says. “Most students today have smartphones, and this app means I can now communicate with students daily, wherever they are. They are learning in fun new ways that fit with their lifestyles.”

His central audience has always been students studying in his subject areas at 91��ɫ and at other institutions. His blog looks at all aspects of employment law and highlights some of the more interesting and current cases, such as Fraser vs. Ontario: Constitutional Right to Collective Bargaining Survives, a discussion on whether Target Canada will buy unionized Zellers, and how the City of Toronto Committee voted to fire 300 unionized garbage collectors. Doorey's Workplace Law Blog won a CLawBies – Canadian Law Blog Award – in 2008 and again in 2009, and was a CLawBies finalist in 2010.

“I'm trying to stimulate their critical thinking in the field and make them want to learn more,” says Doorey. “The blog has attracted a much wider audience than just students, including legal and human resources practitioners and other academics, and I anticipate that the app will allow me to connect to more of these busy professionals.”

The blog, and now the app, will help interested students and professionals keep up with what's going on in new case law and in the academic world “as they commute to
work or wait in line to order coffee.” Doorey sees the app as a way to provide a service to the professional community in his field by summarizing relevant news. “It connects me to a whole new audience that is interested in the subject matter of my blog, but whose lives are too hectic to read it,” he says. “With the app, they just tap an icon, and they can quickly see what's going in the field.”

Doorey points out, however, that writing blogs and creating apps is not for everyone. “They are a lot of work to keep up, and you need to be really committed to it over the long haul for it to work. My motivation is my students, who turn over every few months. The new students give me the energy to keep going, since they respond very favourably, and since the blog and app are always introducing new stories and issues to the classroom, it never gets boring for me or the students.”

He is grateful for the help he received from Oksana Silkina and Alex Neumann in 91��ɫ's e-Services office in getting his app created and submitted to Apple for its approval to be published.

For more information, visit Doorey’s Workplace Law Blog or . It is compatible with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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This afternoon, from 2 to 4pm at the at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, 91��ɫ political science Professor (right) will be among a select group of panellists addressing these political shifts and the implications of the "Arab spring" from regional perspectives. Themes for discussion include, humanitarian intervention, nuclear weapons, non-violence and democracy. The panellists:

Emanuel Adler will speak on "The Israeli perspective on Transformation in the Middle East". Adler is professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Andrea & Charles Bronfman Chair of Israeli Studies, and editor of International Organization.

Adler's interests include the international politics of identity and peace, rationality and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a constructivist reconsideration of strategic logic, including deterrence in post-Cold War international security, the role of practice in international relations, European security institutions, and international relations theory in particular, constructivism, epistemic communities and security communities.

Ramin Jahanbegloo will talk about "Civil Society and the Transformation in the Middle East". Jahanbegloo is an Iranian-Canadian philosopher. He taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto from 1997-2001 and later served as the head of the Department of Contemporary Studies of the Cultural Research Centre in Tehran. In 2006-2007, Jahanbegloo was the Rajni Kothari Professor of Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, India. In April 2006, he was arrested in Tehran Airport charged with preparing a velvet revolution in Iran. He was placed in solitary confinement for four months and released on bail. He is presently a professor of political science and a research fellow in the Centre for Ethics at University of Toronto and a board member of PEN Canada.

In October 2009, Jahanbegloo became the winner of the Peace Prize from the United Nations Association in Spain for his extensive academic works in promoting dialogue between cultures and his advocacy for non-violence.

Saeed Rahnema will present "The View from Iran towards Transformation in the Middle East". Rahnema is professor of political science at 91��ɫ. He has served as the director of the School of Public Policy & Administration and coordinator of the political science program in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. Prior to joining 91��ɫ, he was a professor in the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University. In his homeland of Iran, he taught and worked as a member of the executive of the Industrial Management Institute in Tehran. He is a frequent commentator on Canadian and international media on the issues of the Middle East and Islam, Human Rights, and Left and Labour Movement, and has published several books and numerous articles in English and Farsi (Persian).

He was cited in the �Ѳ������𲹲�’s Guide to Canadian Universities as a "most popular" professor in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. He won the 91��ɫ Teaching Excellence Award in 2004. In 2007, he won the Government of Ontario’s Leadership in Faculty Teaching Award.

Janice Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. Her most recent publications include Networks of Knowledge: Innovation in International Learning (2000); The Cult of Efficiency (2001); and Street Protests and Fantasy Parks (2001). She is a contributor to Canada by Picasso (2006) and the co-author of The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (2007).

Stein was the Massey Lecturer in 2001 and a Trudeau Fellow. She was awarded the Molson Prize by the Canada Council for an outstanding contribution by a social scientist to public debate. She is an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Space is limited. Organizers ask that those interested in attending RSVP to rsvp@utapss.ca.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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"I'm optimistic about the explosion that's happened in Wisconsin," says Leo Panitch, a political science professor at 91��ɫ [Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies]. "For the first time in a long time, the Canadian left is looking south, rather than the other way."

But he's loath to make too many claims for a new dawn rising: "The craziness and mindlessness of so much of what is going on in the American right may – and I'm very cautious about this – it may lead to the same kind of sensibilities that produced a radical new left in the sixties."

Says Panitch, "It's much more complicated now. It's not easy to organize these days when you don't have masses of workers brought together in a big factory and they aren't living in the same part of the city. A lot of people now who are exploited and poorly paid are working in funky areas like producing software or advertising."

Two years ago, he wrote a piece for Foreign Policy magazine titled “Thoroughly Modern Marx” about how the post-crash world might possibly (though by no means inevitably) see a rebirth in radical thinking. That, of course, has not happened – in fact, the political left has suffered setbacks and since 2008, centre-right parties have gained power in Europe.

Panitch is the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and a Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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The conference will take place Friday, Oct. 15 and Saturday, Oct. 16, from 8:30am to 5:30pm in the 91��ɫ Research Tower, Keele campus. It is presented by 91��ɫ’s Work & Labour Studies Program, the 91��ɫ Centre for Research on Work & Society, Ryerson University and the Labour College of Canada.

This interdisciplinary, two-day conference will include research on contemporary issues, papers that place these subjects in historical perspective, and thematic panels and workshops on teaching and researching in the field of labour studies.

This is the fourth year for the conference – the first in Toronto – where junior scholars in the field present their work and meet other emerging voices in labour studies, as well as interact with more senior scholars who serve as commentators on the panels.

“This conference showcases the labour studies community’s continuing vibrancy and impressive national reach,” says Professor Stephanie Ross, coordinator of 91��ɫ’s Work & Labour Studies Program. “Across Canada, labour studies attract researchers who combine rigorous cutting edge scholarship with a capacity to speak to the real and pressing challenges we face in our working lives. Anyone with an interest in how to make work and the economy more socially just will take a lot from this conference.”

The conference is sponsored at 91��ɫ by the Office of the Dean in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought, and the Department of Geography, and at Ryerson by the Department of History, the Dean’s Office in the Faculty of Arts, the Office of the Vice-President of Research & Innovation, and the Centre for Labour-Management Relations. In addition, the Canadian Labour Congress’s Labour College of Canada has also provided much-appreciated support.

For more information, visit the Centre for Research on Work & Society or contact Stephanie Ross at stephr@yorku.ca.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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, a professor in 91��ɫ’s School of Human Resource Management, is the lead researcher for a -funded study which involved interviewing 45 qualified immigrants in Canada, Spain and France. The study looked at the barriers to career development for qualified immigrants in each country, how they coped with them and whether they were able to overcome them.

“These are people who consciously made this decision to move to a new country and had the education and resources to do so,” says Zikic. “It’s a highly skilled group.”

Left: Jelena Zikic

The study is one of three in Zikic’s research project “Investigating Labour Market Experiences of Immigrant Professionals (IPs) in Canada, the Role of Personal and Organizational Barriers to Career Success in the Host Country”. An article based on the study, “Crossing National Boundaries: A Typology of Qualified Immigrants’ Career Orientations”, co-authored by Zikic, Jaime Bonache of the ESADE Business School in Spain and Jean-Luc Cerdin of the ESSEC Business School in France, has been published in the July issue of the .

In terms of experience in dealing with immigrants, Canada is considered the "country of immigrants", Spain is just beginning to get an influx of immigrants, and France falls somewhere in between, says Zikic. Despite the differences, what researchers found was that immigrants in each country faced similar significant barriers to the labour market, such as a lack of recognition for their foreign career training and experience, learning how to navigate the labour expectations of a new country, and difficulty creating new social networks and tapping into local resources to assist in finding a job.

“It is a very challenging journey that these people take. Getting work doesn’t happen overnight,” says Zikic. “A lot of these immigrants had great careers in their own country. They had to give up quite a bit. Many of them had a lot of status, friends, a network, and it all disappeared when they entered the host country.”

The study sought to understand the underlying causes of underemployment for qualified immigrants from professional backgrounds and how they managed physical and psychological mobility.

What they found was the subjective experiences of qualified immigrants were interdependent with the social, economic and cultural realities, such as the structure of local labour markets and the need to retrain. Older immigrants were often more resistant to retraining and re-education, believing they were too old. As a result, they were more disappointed with the experience and had less success in finding work in their field.

Those who embraced the new challenges, about 24 per cent of those interviewed, were extremely positive about career success in the new country, while the majority – 49 per cent – adapted to their new circumstances and were successful at either adapting their careers or crafting new ones, although many were in survival jobs. The adaptive group understood the reality of having to retrain or get more education and was prepared to deal with the circumstances. “They had this sort of future orientation; they knew good things would come eventually,” says Zikic. The remaining 27 per cent found the obstacles impossible to overcome as they often had psychological barriers as well, such as age or other constraining circumstances.

Immigrants used six strategies in finding work – maintaining motivation, managing identity, developing new credentials, developing local know-how, building a new social network and understanding career success – but again, how successful they were was dependent on whether they embraced, adapted or resisted the challenges.

“It’s incredible how much talent is searching for the right job and a lot of immigrants just give up,” says Zikic. “We often call this the brain waste; they’re underemployed.”

It is important when devising programs for immigrants to keep in mind the interplay between subjective experiences and the objective realities, she says. Most studies look at one or the other, but little has been done on how each affects the other, and more research is needed.

Zikic also notes that in Canada there is a need for more programs that offer occupation-specific mentoring to immigrants, such as The Mentoring Partnership available through the .

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Two teams led by 91��ɫ University researchers have received $5 million in research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Their multinational research teams, involving multiple universities and community partners in a large-scale collaboration, have each received $2.5 million to examine long-term residential healthcare and global suburbanization.

The funding is part of ’s $10-million investment in critical issues of intellectual, social, economic and cultural significance through the (MCRI) program, the largest award competition SSHRC currently runs.

The program contributes to the deeper understanding of people and society while providing graduate students with research training opportunities. Royal Galipeau, MP for Ottawa–Orléans, made the announcement in Ottawa this morning on behalf of Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology.

Pat Armstrong, professor of sociology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies and an executive member of both the 91��ɫ Institute for Health Research and the Graduate Program in Health Policy & Equity, will lead a study to identify promising practices for understanding and organizing long-term residential healthcare.

Right: Pat Armstrong

Although many of Canada’s most vulnerable citizens live in long-term residential care, it is often characterized as a last resort rather than as a positive option where both providers and residents can thrive. Armstrong’s project seeks to learn from and with other countries to understand the approaches, structures, accountability practices, and ownership arrangements that create conditions prompting respectful and dignified treatment for both residents and caregivers.

Twenty-five researchers, eight partnering institutions, and 17 universities in six countries will work across disciplines to capture and share data and best practices. Armstrong is Chair in Health Services and Nursing Research, co-funded by the (CHSRF) and the (CIHR).

Roger Keil, professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, director of the City Institute at 91��ɫ, and director of the , is working with 44 researchers at 29 universities, and 16 partners in 12 countries to better understand the challenges suburbanization poses in a globalizing world.

Right: Roger Keil

Based on the experience of Canadian suburbanization, but ranging from North America’s wealthy gated communities to Europe’s high-rise-dominated suburbs, the exploding outskirts of Indian and Chinese cities to the slums and squatter settlements of Africa and Latin America, this project is the first to systematically take stock of worldwide suburban developments while analyzing their governance models, land use, infrastructure and suburban everyday life. The project also includes collaboration with the on documentaries about life in suburban high rises.

Of the four $2.5-million grants awarded, 91��ɫ was the only institution with two successful projects, building on its strong track record in leading large, interdisciplinary collaborative research projects. Prior to today’s announcement, 91��ɫ researchers held nine major SSHRC collaborative grants worth a total of $13.6 million in research funding.

“As the only institution to win multiple awards in this category, 91��ɫ’s researchers have clearly demonstrated their national and international excellence and leadership in large-scale, SSHRC research projects,” says Stan Shapson, vice-president research and innovation. “Leading major research initiatives allows us to address key social issues facing our society. As global populations expand and age, suburban research and new approaches to long-term residential healthcare are increasingly important to the well-being of Canadians and nations around the world. These projects provide unique opportunities for Pat, Roger, and their research collaborators to conduct groundbreaking research with significant impact on real-world issues.”

“These grants highlight the excellence of our country’s talented researchers and recognize the importance of fostering international collaboration to keep Canada at the forefront of research, development and innovation in the 21st century,” said Chad Gaffield, president of SSHRC.

91��ɫ's other major SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary collaborative research projects

• “Assets Coming Together for Youth: Linking Research, Policy and Action for Positive Youth Development”, led by social work Professor Uzo Anucha in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) is developing a comprehensive youth strategy that will outline how marginalized urban communities like Toronto’s Jane-Finch neighbourhood can use their community assets to support positive youth development.
• The , led by Professor Emeritus Wesley Cragg in the Schulich School of Business, is mobilizing the University’s business expertise by bringing University researchers together in dialogue with leaders and researchers in business, government and the volunteer sector.
• The , led by Professor Stephen Gaetz in the Faculty of Education enhances the impact of research on homelessness and the housing crisis by increasing collaboration and discussion among researchers, policy-makers and community workers.
• The , led by LA&PS social work Professor Susan McGrath, studies refugee and forced migration issues to find solutions to the plight of refugees worldwide.
• “Monitoring the Human Rights of People with Disabilities in Canada”, led by health policy & management Professor Marcia Rioux in the Faculty of Health, monitors and records human rights violations to put together an accurate picture of the daily lives of Canadians with disabilities.
• The Toronto Immigrant Employment Data Initiative, led by geography Professor Philip Kelly in LA&PS, assists community organizations whose mandate includes the better integration of immigrants into Toronto's labour force by providing these organizations with free access to statistical data and analysis on various aspects of immigrant labour market integration.
• “Slavery, Memory, Citizenship”, led by Distinguished Research Professor Paul Lovejoy, includes a team of more than 50 Canadian and international scholars who are researching the global migrations of African peoples under conditions of slavery and how the resulting racism arising from the exploitation of African peoples has shaped modern societies.
• “The University as a Civic Change Agent: Community-Based Knowledge Mobilization”, led by David Phipps, director of the Office of Research Services, is developing a community-focused input model for that seeks first to identify community knowledge needs and then focus university research expertise to help fill that need by creating a self-sustaining cycle of knowledge production and its uptake for policy, practice and community capacity building.
• “Work in a Warming World”, led by social science Professor Carla Lipsig-Mummé in LA&PS, studies the challenge presents to Canadian employment and workplaces by examining seven Canadian employment sectors to seek policy, training, employment and workplace solutions to effectively assist Canada’s transition to a low-emission economy.

For complete competition results, visit .

By Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with photos courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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