I am a critical gerontology scholar who draws on critical disability studies, feminist, anti-racist, and historical materialist approaches to understanding care work and care policy in an aging, globalizing world. My research and teaching is community- and user-engaged and prioritizes marginalized perspectives and transformative social change.
Currently, my research focuses on transnational political economies of caring for older and disabled people, considering the relations of racialized (im)migrant labour and quality of life for older and disabled people in Canadian long-term residential and home care systems. This research is supported by both SSHRC and CIHR grants and builds on my doctoral research, which examined alternative community-based care formations, political consciousness, and revolutionary organizing in the context of austerity in Ontario.
Click here for more information on my SSHRC Insight Development Grant “Migrant Care Work and the Geopolitics of ‘Aging in Place’ During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” which collaborates with Migrante Manitoba to explore the experiences of (im)migrant home care workers during the pandemic.
Selected recent publications
- Hande, Mary Jean, Janice Keefe and Deanne Taylor. (2021, online). Long Term Residential Care Policy Guidance for Staff to Support Resident Quality of Life. The Gerontologist: Special Issue on Workforce Issues in Long Term Care. http://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnaa176
Media release here - Hande, Mary Jean, Aliya Jamal, and Christine Kelly. (2020). Direct Funding and the depoliticization of home care systems: Popular rhetoric and policy directions in Ontario. Canadian Review of Social Policy/Revue canadienne de politique sociale, 80: 26-49. https://crsp.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/crsp/article/view/40353
- Hande, Mary Jean, Ayesha Mian Akram and Shelley Condratto. (2020). “’All of this happens here?’: Diminishing Perceptions of Canada through Immigrants’ Precarious Work in Ontario.” Journal of International Migration and Integration 21: 711-729. doi: 10.1007/s12134-019-00683-y