Belinda Leach

Belinda Leach is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at the University of Guelph, and holds a University Research Chair in Rural Gender Studies as well as leading the research agenda on Rural Work-Life at CFWW.

Belinda's interests include economic restructuring; formal, informal and domestic work; gender; development; culture and class; industrial homework. She has looked at the expansion of home-based industrial work and the contraction of unionized industrial work in rural and urban Ontario, and how families both accommodate and resist changing work patterns.

With co-author Tony Winson, Dr. Leach received the 2003 John Porter Memorial Book Prize for Contingent Labour, Disrupted Lives: Labour and Community in the New Rural Economy, in which they argue that the new rural economy involves a fundamental shift in people's stability and security, forcing them to rebuild their lives in the new economic terrain. Belinda is also working on SSHRC-funded research projects including "Marianne's Park: A Project in Cultural Memory", a collaboration between the Centre for Cultural Studies at U of G and Women in Crisis, which explores the way a local park in Guelph uses and creates cultural memory to enhance feminist activism; and "Workers and Social Cohesion in a Global Era" with collaborators in Labour Studies and the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University, which is examining the relationship of workers and their organizations to other elements of civil society and to supranational agencies.

Personal Website: http://www.sociology.uoguelph.ca/faculty_staff/belinda_leach.htm

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