SFU Research Masterclass Series: "Integrating Aspects of Academic Life: Action and Research"

Abstract

About the speaker:

Marjorie Griffin Cohen is an economist who is a professor of Political Science and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She has written extensively in the areas of political economy and public policy with special emphasis on issues concerning, the Canadian economy, women, labour, electricity deregulation, energy, climate change and labour, and international trade agreements.

Among her publications are "Public Policy for Women" (2009), "Remapping Gender in the New Global Order" (2007), "Governing Under Stress" (2004), "Training the Excluded for Work" (2003), "Global Turbulence" (2003), "Global Instability" (2002), "Canadian Women's Issues" (two volumes, (1995), "Women's Work, Markets, and Economic Development in Nineteenth Century Ontario" (1988), and "Free Trade and the Future of Women's Work" (1987).

Professor Cohen was a director of NewGrade Energy (Sask) and has served on several boards and commissions in British Columbia including the B.C. Industrial Inquiry Commission on the Fisheries; Board of Directors of B.C. Hydro; Board of Directors of B.C. Power Exchange. She was also instrumental in establishing the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in B.C., was its first Chair, and is on its Board of Directors. Her feminist activity has been considerable including being Vice-President and Treasurer of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.

She currently is involved in two research projects related to global warming and gender, a project on gender and economic crises, and another on the Public Policy of Austerity. She plans to hold an international workshop on Climate Change and Gender in Rich Countries in Vancouver in June.

About the Interviewer: Elise Chenier, an Associate Professor in the Department of History, is a queer, anti-racist feminist scholar whose work explores sexuality in twentieth century Canada and the United States. She is the author of Strangers In Our Midst: Sexual Deviance in Postwar Ontario (2008) and creator of the online research methods learning tool www.interracialintimacies.org She read Marjorie Cohen's very first book while an undergraduate student at York University.