GSWS 312 - Immigrants, Women and Transnational Migration

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For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies by email moninder_lalli@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.

For researching the topic of refugees, see the guide: SA 366: Forced Migration and Refugee Studies

Essay

Start Your Research Here - This page gives you an overview of the research process and steps to take to find resources for your essay.

Selected encyclopedias and handbooks

Get overviews, summaries, key authors, debates and ideas from encyclopedias, handbooks or textbooks. 

For more, try Background information

Find books in the Library

Library Catalogue search guide | Catalogue search tips

Search the SFU Library Catalogue: Advanced keyword

Example research question:

"What is the effect of the Anti-terrorism Act and how is it used for national security"

(anti-terror* OR national security OR border security) AND (law OR legislat* OR regulat*) AND (race OR racial OR islam*) AND Canad*
Results - you can further limit the results by "subject" and "resource type" of books or book chapters.

You can further limit the search results (below) by "subject" or "resource type"

Keywords for additional topics:

Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words

Use pulldown menu and select, "Source Types" as "Books"

Note:  For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")

Use the  "subject  headings" within the library record for a relevant book to find more books on that topic.

Selected books

Browse by subject

Catalogue Search / Browse

  Change "Title" to "Subject" and enter:

Find journal articles, news and legal info

Start with the "Women's Studies International" database and then move on to other databases. Limit your search to "academic", "scholarly" or "peer-reviewed." For articles not available in fulltext within the database, use the "Get@SFU" or to initiate an inter-library loan request.

Databases for journal articles

  • Women's Studies International  Key database for issues related to women or gender.
  • ProQuest Sociology Collection - for issues related to class, gender, racism, sexuality and sexism and theoretical and applied sociology, social science, and policy science. Other major topics include: migration, refugees, societal structures, and immigrants
  • Social Sciences Full Text  Covers social science journals
  • GEOBASE  "Human geography" discipline studies issues related to "refugees" and "migration."
  • Political Science Complete - scholarly articles related to labour, migration, unions, policies and remittances
  • Statista  A statistics portal that integrates statistics from thousands of sources and provides simple exports of both data and charts in multiple formats.  Look for the "source" for each table or graph.
  • Business Source Complete
    • For country profiles, choose "country profile" box, and in keyword search box, enter your terms: France
  • Oxford Bibliographies Online   - for literature reviews, bibliographical essays on topics.
  • Eldis Gateway to Development Information Full text documents from governments and other organizations with information on countries, issues and topics such as gender & migration.

For Canadian topics, also try

  • CBCA Complete  Canadian scholarly journal articles, trade publications, dissertations, books, newspapers and and magazines.
  • Canada Commons (formerly, Canadian Electronic Library from desLibris) - contains the full text of public policy documents from Canadian institutes, think-tanks and research groups.
    • The "Boolean operators" (AND, OR) must be in capital letters.
    • If you don't want variations of a term then put the term in quotation marks ("term")
    • Advanced search engine:
  • Canadian Newsstream  covers the major Canadian daily newspapers.
  • Canadian Research Index Includes all depository publications of research value issued by both the federal government and the ten provinces and three territories; hard to find non-depository publications issued by hundreds of Canadian government agencies and departments

Databases for legal journal articles, legislation, cases 

  • CanLII  Canadian case law and statutes
     
    • Use only the first search box to enter your entire search:  immigrant* and women and labour
    • Use the "tabs" at the top of search results to limit to cases, legislation, or secondary sources such as decisions by tribunals.
    • Legislation and Tribunals
       
  • Westlaw Next Canada  Access to BestCase, CriminalSource and LawSource. Contains former Criminal Spectrum content.
    • Within the database, look at Canadian Encyclopedic Digest and  Canadian Abridgment Digests for overviews of labour topics and  precedents. 
    • From within the database, choose "Index to Canadian legal literature" to find scholarly, legal journal articles on topics
    • Try a search (e.g. "immigrant*"), and in the column on left-hand side, look at "Canadian Encyclopedic Digest" entries.

Key Journals

Government information

Canadian

Labour information

Canada

British Columbia

  • British Columbia Employment Standards Act  The provincial legislation that ensures that employees in British Columbia receive at least basic standards of compensation and conditions of employment. The British Columbia Employment Standards Act and Regulation sets out minimum working conditions for all employees covered under provincial labour laws. A number of sectors or industries in British Columbia are subject to specific regulations that only apply to them. Click here to see the regulations for specific industries.
     
  • British Columbia Labour Relations Code  The provincial legislation that protects the right of employees in British Columbia to be a member of a trade union and to participate in its lawful activities. The Code further delineates the rights of employees and employers.
     
  • Human Rights Protection  "British Columbia has a law to protect and promote human rights. It is called the B.C. Human Rights Code or the Code. The Code helps to protect you from discrimination and harassment." [from the website]  [BC] Human Rights Code

Immigration and refugees information

Statistics

  • Statistics Canada -  the major statistical gathering agency of the federal government. It publishes the "whole range of statistics on the economic and social activities of the Canadian people".  There are daily, weekly, quarterly, annual and irregular publications. They  also publishes the Census of Canada at five year intervals.
    • Pre-tabulated data tables under "statistics by subject."
    • This data can be downloaded (CSV format) into Excel.
    • In addition to "data", check out the "Analysis" and other reports (see tabs at the top of the data tables).
    • Publications by subject
    •  
      • Labour
        • how many people are employed or unemployed; the unemployment rate; which industries or occupations people work in;
        • the hours they work; commuting patterns; wage and non-wage benefits; job training; labour mobility;
        • work absences; unionization; unpaid work; and other topics. Also includes geographic and demographic characteristics.
  • BC Statistics   Check out the tabs at the top

Citing Government documents, Canadian -- APA style | MLA style | Chicago style

  • Statista  A statistics portal that integrates statistics from thousands of sources and provides simple exports of both data and charts in multiple formats.  Look for the "source" for each table or graph.

   One year campus wide pilot expiring on December 31, 2017. Please send feedback to Mark Bodnar (mbodnar@sfu.ca).

​United States

International

Statistics
    • OECD iLibrary - Publications from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including country studies, forecasting publications, reports, periodicals, and socio-economic databases. Topics covered include agriculture, developing economies, education, employment, energy, environment, migration, social issues, and sustainable development.

Labour related websites

Feminist theory website

Podcasting

Details for finding and creating podcasts are available on another guide: 

Using Google and Google Scholar

Search Tips for Google and Google Scholar

While searching the internet can find unexpected gems, be sure to evaluate the sources using the guide, "Evaluating sources"

  • Use intitle: to force Google to find those words in the titles of results.  Use quotation marks ("") to search for phrases.  With a Google search the Boolean operator "AND" is assumed, so you don't need to use it in your search strategy.

Google

See also, Google's Advanced Search for easier searching

Google Scholar for topic and "citation" searches

Set up Google Scholar library links and button 

Topic search

E.g. 

Flawed by design? A case study of federal enforcement of migrant workers' labour rights in Canada

       S Marsden, E Tucker, LF Vosko - Canadian Lab. & Emp. LJ, 2021 - HeinOnline
       … of temporary migration programs in Canada and explain why … the sources of labour rights
       for migrant workers, and explain … to better protect migrant workers' labour rights. However, …

"Citation" searching

Search for your "key" article.  Check the link "cited by" right beneath the reference to that article

E.g. Who has cited the following article?

Strauss, K., & McGrath, S. (2017). Temporary migration, precarious employment and unfree labour relations: Exploring the ‘continuum of exploitation’ in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Geoforum. Vol 78, 199–208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.01.008

The above 2017 article has been cited more than 275 times.

Google "custom" search engines for publications by NGO & IGOs

  • NGO Search  - NGO Search is a Google Custom Search that searches across hundreds non-governmental organization (NGO) websites. NGO 

Search: migrat* "south asia"

  • IGO Search
    International governmental organizations (IGOs) are organizations made up of more than one national government—examples include NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the WHO (World Heath Organization). The governments are the members. IGO Search is a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) that searches across IGO websites. 

    Search: migrat* "south asia"

Library guides

Presentation skills

See the Student Learning Commons for expert and friendly help with academic writing, learning, and study strategies.

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