Stephanie MayellUniversity of Toronto | U of T · Department of Anthropology
Stephanie Mayell
Master of Arts
About
16
Publications
309
Reads
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30
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I have been conducting community-based health research with migrant agricultural workers in Ontario and Jamaica since 2014. Currently, I am a PhD Candidate in the Medical Anthropology Program at the University of Toronto, where my doctoral research explores Jamaican migrant farmworkers' experiences of health and injury. In 2016, I completed my master’s degree in the Anthropology of Health at McMaster University, where my thesis investigated Jamaican agricultural workers’ experiences of stress.
Additional affiliations
October 2018 - present
Position
- Researcher
Description
- Currently collaborating with researchers at the Migrant Worker Health Project on several research projects and initiatives related to migrant worker health issues, health care and workers' compensation access, and COVID-19 (www.migrantworker.ca).
Publications
Publications (16)
Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has often been portrayed as a model for temporary migration programmes. It is largely governed by the Contracts negotiated between Canada and Mexico and Commonwealth Caribbean countries respectively. This article provides a critical analysis of the Contract by examining its structural context and consid...
Background
Nine migrant agricultural workers died in Ontario, Canada, between January 2020 and June 2021.
Methods
To better understand the factors that contributed to the deaths of these migrant agricultural workers, we used a modified qualitative descriptive approach. A research team of clinical and academic experts reviewed coroner files of the...
Since 1966, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) has been bringing Jamaican workers to Canada on seasonal labour contracts that can last up to eight months of the year. The purpose of this report is to elucidate the ways the SAWP exposes workers to physical and psychosocial health risks that make them vulnerable to various poor health ou...
This project was funded by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA), and took place from May 2021 to March 2022.. The main goal of the project was to create an inventory of available mental health and psychosocial wellbeing supports and services available to Latinx and Caribbean International Agricultural Workers (IAWs)...
For more than fifty years, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) has been bringing Jamaican farm workers to Canada every year on temporary labour contracts of up to eight months annually. To ensure a healthy seasonal labour force, SAWP workers are medically pre-screened in Jamaica each year as a prerequisite of participation in the progra...
Farming is a dangerous and stressful occupation. A recent study demonstrates that Canadian farmers experience higher levels of stress, depression, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion than other groups. In 2017, approximately 50,000 migrant agricultural workers (MAWs) from Mexico and various Caribbean countries travelled to Canada on temporary work pe...
In 2015, approximately 40,000 migrant agricultural workers from Mexico and various Caribbean countries travelled to Canada under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), and more than half (24,000) worked on farms in Ontario. Employed on temporary labour contracts, SAWP workers are separated from their families and home communities for up t...
In 2015, more than 40,000 agricultural labourers travelled to Canada on temporary employment contracts under the SAWP (Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program). Workers arrive in Canada healthy, as they are medically pre-screened in their sending countries as a prerequisite of participation in the SAWP. While in Canada, SAWP workers labour under a les...
Tens of thousands of migrant agricultural workers from Mexico and various Caribbean countries travel to Ontario every year under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Employed on temporary labour contracts, SAWP workers are separated from their families and home communities for up to eight months of the year. Although workers generally a...
Migrant labour is a major component of the contemporary global economy, integrated across various sectors, industries and national contexts. In recent years, international instruments have focussed on recognizing and protecting migrant workers’ rights, however, their health considerations have been largely neglected in both policy and practice. Mig...
The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) is a transnational labour agreement between Canada, Mexico, and various Caribbean countries that brings thousands of Jamaican migrant workers to Canada each year to work on farms. This thesis explores Jamaican SAWP workers’ experiences of stress in Ontario, and situates these experiences within a syst...
Under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), thousands of migrant workers from Jamaica travel to Canada every year to work on Canadian farms. Although workers generally arrive in Canada healthy, the social determinants of health associated with seasonal farm work may contribute to a variety of poor health outcomes. The mental and emotion...
There are approximately 40,000 migrant agricultural workers (MAWs) employed on temporary labour contracts in Canada, primarily from Mexico and the Caribbean. Although they have legal access to provincial health care under Canada’s “universal system,” these workers experience numerous practical barriers, including: long work hours; limited clinic ho...
Projects
Project (1)
The goal of this doctoral research is to elucidate how Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program operates as a necropolitical system of unfree labour, wherein Jamaican workers are kept in a perpetual ‘state of injury’ commensurable to the figure of the slave in the colonial plantation system. Building on a structural violence framework, which gives attention to histories of slavery, imperialism and modernity, this research will investigate the policies, practices, and power relations inherent to the SAWP that maintain this state of injury.
