Jennifer Elrick

Associate Professor
Chair in MulticulturalismJennifer Elrick

Stephen Leacock Building, Room 825
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2T7

Tel.: 514-398-1579
Fax: 514-398-7476
E-mail: jennifer.elrick [at] mcgill.ca

Personal website: https://jenniferelrick.wordpress.com



Research Areas

Migration governance, diversity, and social stratification; immigration policymaking and implementation; social construction of legal and administrative categories (e.g., in censuses and immigration law); citizenship; multiculturalism; political communication (deliberation).

TOP OF PAGE

Biography

(PhD, University of Toronto, Department of Sociology, 2017)

Jennifer Elrick joined the Department of Sociology in 2016. She studies connections between migration governance, diversity, and social stratification. Under this umbrella, her most recent work focuses on two complementary themes: 1) how actors inside states construct classifications of populations in terms of legal status, race/ethnicity, social class, morality, and other social distinctions; and 2) the material and symbolic effects of these institutionalized classifications. She is also interested in exploring people’s “bottom-up” responses to the “top-down” classifications developed by states (e.g., ethnic categories in censuses and legal categories in immigration law). Her research draws on a range of qualitative methods, including interviews, focus groups, and content analysis, and is multi-national in scope, focusing on Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Since arriving at McGill, Prof. Elrick’s research has received financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC), and an Internal McGill COVID-19 Rapid Response Social Sciences and Humanities Award & MI4 Emergency Covid-19 Research Funding (ECRF). The results of this research have been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Migration, International Migration Review, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the Journal of International Migration and Integration, Sociological Forum, and Sociology.

Her first book, Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada , was published by University of Toronto Press in late 2021. It has since been shortlisted for the Canadian Political Science Association’s 2022 Donald Smiley Prize for the best book in a field relating to the study of government and politics in Canada. It also received an official honourable mention in the American Political Science Association’s (Canadian Politics Section) 2022 Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award, which honours a significant contemporary contribution to scholarship on Canadian politics

Prof. Elrick plays an active role in international academic publishing and organizations. She is a member of the Editorial Board at Ethnic and Racial Studies. She has also been elected to serve on the Executive Committee at the Council for European Studies (CES) from 2022 to 2026, where she previously served as Co-Chair of the Immigration Research Network (2016-2020).

Publications

A full list of publications and a current CV are available on Prof. Elrick's personal website.

TOP OF PAGE

Courses Taught

Graduate Courses

SOCI 595 Immigration Control and The State

Undergraduate Courses

SOCI 210 Sociological Perspectives

SOCI 330 Sociological Theory

SOCI 430 The Sociology of Citizenship

 TOP OF PAGE

Back to top