Biography

Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez (she, her, ella) is a Latinx Assistant Professor in Labour Studies and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. She is the co-founder of the award-winning collective, Justice for Migrant Workers, J4MW, that has advocated for the rights of migrant farmworkers in Canada and transnationally since 2001.

As a community engaged scholar and public sociologist Dr. Encalada Grez has mobilized her migrant-labour research through various media such as documentaries and given talks in venues such the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the United Nations in New York and in Parliament Hill, Ottawa.

Dr. Encalada Grez has also worked with export-processing workers throughout Mexico and Central America and as lead travelling faculty teaching social justice issues to university students from the USA in over 6 countries, from Jordan, India, Chile, Senegal and more. Before the pandemic, she was the Academic Director of an intensive study abroad program in local development and social justice for USAmerican university students in her city of birth, Valparaiso, Chile.

Dr. Encalada Grez's academic and political trajectories are driven by her own immigrant working class family’s experiences of displacement, imperialism, and racism. Inspired by national liberation movements and workers’ struggles throughout the globe, she became the first in her family to go to university and is now an academic committed to decolonializing and transformative pedagogies for structural change.