luanngg


Luann Good Gingrich

Photo of Luann Good Gingrich

School of Social Work

Professor
Academic Director, Research Commons

Office: Kaneff Tower 508
Phone: Cell: 519-500-3931
Email: luanngg@yorku.ca
Primary website: Research Commons

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Luann Good Gingrich is a Professor in the School of Social Work, and Academic Director of the Research Commons at York University. Using an approach to critical analysis of social systems based in Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu), Popular Education (Freire), Institutional Ethnography (Smith) and Community-Based Research, her research aims to describe and measure the processes and outcomes of social exclusion and inclusion. Her work zeros in on the interface of ideology (or worldview), material and symbolic inequality, migration and displacement, and social welfare and human services. She integrates theory development, community-engaged research, secondary quantitative data analysis and critical pedagogy to inspire imaginations and strategies for social inclusion through inter-personal change, place change, and system change. She applies her theoretical and empirical work to the development of approaches to research, social policy and practice that lead from inequality to just relationships, from structural violence to social healing, and from competition and conflict to collaboration and shared responsibility.

Good Gingrich is a member of the editorial board for the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies.

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The complex relationships between the state, “mainstream” society, and culturally and religiously distinct communities have been central in Good Gingrich's professional practice and academic work. Her earlier research traced official policies and practices to the everyday lives of migrant groups in Canada (temporary migrant workers, Mennonite migrants from Mexico) and Central American migrant women in southern Mexico. Her analyses have demonstrated the paradoxical outcomes of marketized social policies and human services, as they function to make and organize social groups defined by race, ethnicity, nation, class, religion, and gender. In the past decade, Good Gingrich has extended her program of research to examine the dynamics of social exclusion and inclusion in transnational and local contexts. Specifically:

  • the intersecting dimensions of social/ecological splits of market logic as manifested in transnational (im)mobilities and displacement, and the role of national social welfare and human services
  • cultivating cultures of inclusion to transform symbolic economies of exclusion in human service organizations
  • the precise role of the devaluation of the Indigenous Feminine and symbolic violence in the Canadian colonial project.

    Good Gingrich's research interests and teaching expertise include:

    • Social exclusion and transnational livelihoods, and the role of social welfare and human services
    • Cultivating cultures of inclusion in human service organizations
    • Social exclusion and inclusion for (im)migrants and racialized groups in Canada
    • Social dynamics defined by migration, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, and wealth
    • Formal and informal processes of social division and social support in transnational and supra-national social environments
    • The paradoxes of voluntary social exclusion, “choice”, and social inclusion in contexts of migratory livelihoods
    • “Women’s work” in globalized, polarized, de-socialized, racialised and feminized labour markets
    • Emerging forms of diaspora, particularly for Dietsche Mennonites from Latin America
    • The intersections between ideas, material realities and subjective experience of policy systems and social programs

    Degrees

    PhD, Social Work, University of Toronto
    Master of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University

Research Interests

social exclusion/inclusion; epistemic reflexivity; relational accountability; migration and border studies; critical social policy analysis; social welfare and human services