Quelle est la valeur du travail?
Passé, présent et futur de la classe ouvrière
et des études sur le travail

Promouvoir la justice sociale et contrer le travail précaire par la recherche

15 novembre
15h15 - 16h45
R-M110
Avec :
Présidence :

Résumé

This panel is a bilingual roundtable featuring contributors to La recherche engagée sur le terrain du travail précaire : réflexions méthodologiques, éthiques et épistémologiques [Engaged Field Research on Precarious Work: Methodological, Ethical, and Epistemological Reflections], published in 2024 at Presses de l’Université du Québec (PUQ).

The panelists are researchers deeply committed to engaged and critical research practices that confront the ongoing precarization of work and the broader impoverishment of workers in Canada. Their work, rooted in collaboration and partnership involving different social actors, positions knowledge production as a political act—one that contributes directly to labor struggles and social transformation in precarious work contexts.

This roundtable will offer a space to revisit and reflect on the evolution of their research practices and commitments, as documented in the book. Through a dialogue anchored in both scholarship and social engagement, panelists will address four central themes:

  1. The role of research and knowledge production in advancing labor struggles;
  2. The conditions that shape the usefulness and impact of research in driving social change;
  3. The tensions and possibilities at the intersection of academia and social justice.
  4. The role of engaged research spaces in reshaping research practices.

By centering on both methodological and political considerations, this roundtable invites a broader conversation on the possibilities and responsibilities of critical, justice-oriented scholarship on precarious work.

Biographies

Karen Messing is an ergonomics researcher in the SAGE team of the CINBIOSE research centre and professor emerita in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal.  Her research concerns the impact of gender on work activity in low-paid professions and the interface between interface between gender, biology and occupational health; it is carried out in partnership with community groups.  She is the author of over 160 peer-reviewed published articles and of Bent Out of Shape: Shame, Solidarity and Women’s Bodies at Work (also published in French and Korean; winner of the 2021 Leo Panitch prize awarded by the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies and of the Foreword Indies Prize in Women’s Studies for 2021, USA), Pain and Prejudice: What Science Can Learn About Work from the People Who Do It, and One-eyed Science: Occupational Health and Working Women. She has been awarded Officer status in the Order of Canada (2019), the William P. Yant Award (2014) from the American Industrial Hygiene Association, “membre d’honneur” of the Société d’ergonomie de langue française (2022) and Fellow of the International Ergonomics Association (2024).

Yanick Noiseux est professeur agrégé au département de sociologie de l’Université de Montréal et chercheur principal au Groupe interdisciplinaire et interuniversitaire de recherche sur l’emploi, la pauvreté et la protection sociale (GIREPS). Ses travaux portent principalement sur le renouvellement du syndicalisme et de l’action collective des travailleurs et travailleuses pauvres ainsi que sur les transformations du travail et les politiques sociales dans le contexte de la mondialisation. Il a récemment codirigé, avec Laurence Hamel-Roy, Mylène Fauvel, Rabih Jamil, Manuel Salamanca Cardona et Cheolki Yoon l’ouvrage « La recherche engagée sur le terrain du travail précaire : réflexions méthodologiques, éthiques et épistémologiques»  (2024, PUQ)