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AbstractThis paper explores the relationships between low‐income single mothers and their adolescent and early adult children utilizing qualitative interview and focus group data with youth from three Canadian cities. The research explored youth provisioning roles in these families. Provisioning, a concept widely understood in the global south, refers to labour used to sustain low‐income families and includes emotional labour, care work, trade and exchange and paid labour. Findings from this study identified strong expressions of positive attachment and close relationships between youth and their family members. The paper queries whether positive attachment may be built through roles where youth see themselves as integral parts of a family team and where their contributions are acknowledged. These findings invite us to explore and perhaps challenge the oft‐reported correlations between living in a low‐income, lone mother‐led family and poor childhood outcomes and poor attachment. Can these outcomes be mediated and can the provisioning roles youth undertake possibly be such mediators?

This article discusses risk and protective factors impacting resilience through exploring how and why some mothers were able to achieve positive outcomes (economically, socially, as parents) in spite of adversity. By employing a qualitative research method and participatory action research, data were collected from 20 in-depth individual interviews, 3 focus groups with 18 participants and case profiles from the larger data set. The analysis counters the dominant individualism ideologies, which make the person solely responsible for their situation, and instead, argues that social structures can play important roles in building resilience and capacity. Practices of feminist NGOs reported in this study confirm this. The analysis has implications for changing practices in welfare bureaucracies and supporting feminist and similar NGOs.

This article analyses the gendered and differential benefits and costs associated with globalization. It explores current globalization-induced labour force changes in terms of their intersection with race, class and gender, suggesting globalization as a force in concert with other phenomena which marginalizes groups of already disadvantaged Canadian women. The implications of these changes are analysed from two perspectives - their impacts on the women and families facing exclusion from mainstream life and their broader sociopolitical effects. The article posits that these changes in concert with a retrenching welfare state and an increasing commodification of social roles may act to transform the nature of Canadian society, which has maintained a delicate balance between the inclusive social welfare schemes of Western Europe and those much less generous provisions in the US, a society which, until recently, widely conferred social citizenship and enabled access to a valued and acknowledged public sphere.

COVID-19 hit and instantaneously research using in-person methods were paused. As feminist and critical social work scholars and researchers, we began to consider the implications of pausing our ongoing project exploring the provisioning and resilience of youth living in low-income, lone mother households. Reflexively, we wondered how the youth, families, and issues we were connected to would be impacted by the pandemic. We were pulled into both ethical and methodological questions. While the procedural ethics of maintaining safety were clear, what became less clear were the relational ethics. What was brought into question were our own social positions and our roles and responsibilities in our relationships with the youth. For both ethical and methodological reasons, we decided to expand the original research scope from in-person interviews to include a photovoice to be executed using online, remote methods. In this article, we discuss those ethical and methodological tensions. In the first part, we discuss the relational ethics that propelled us to commit to expanding our work, while in the second part, we discuss our move to combining photovoice and remote methods.

Based on the analysis of qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted with 92 welfare-reliant lone mothers living across Canada, this article explores the "micro-aggressions" experienced by these women in their interactions with the social welfare system. Micro-aggressions refer to the verbal and nonverbal, relational exchanges that send denigrating messages to persons of marginalized and discriminated against social groups. From the analysis, we conclude that class and gender become sites, intersecting and interlocking, where micro-aggressions as a form of interpersonal violence and discrimination occur against women/lone mothers living in poverty that act to diminish the agency and sense of public worthiness of these women, in turn limiting their access to contesting these constructions.

This article examines the ways in which dominant discourses about poor lone mothers are both contested and accommodated among three groups of actors within the workfare system in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on qualitative data from a national research project on lone mothers and social assistance, the authors examine and analyze how lone mothers construct their own subjectivity, as well as how it is constructed by workers in state-contracted nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that deliver job-readiness and related workfare programs and by welfare workers who assess and administer welfare benefits.