Sabrina Perić presents at Congress 2025
Earlier this summer, Lab Co-director Dr. Sabrina Perić travelled to Toronto’s George Brown College to attend the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. She presented a paper on “Women and the Work of Care in 20th and 21st century Oil Towns in Alberta” at the meeting for the Canadian Historical Association.
Popular and academic representations of gender in Alberta oil towns in the 20th and 21st century have tended to focus on men and masculinity primarily, while importantly calling attention to the objectification of women in these settings. While these analyses have been an important recognition of the role of ongoing patriarchal dynamics in industrial settings, they have also often ignored the important and complex work of women in building community and networks of care.
Her CHA paper was a first attempt at comparing the role and work of women in two different geographic and temporal spaces in Alberta: mid-20th century Leduc and 21st century Fort McMurray. As primary sites of Canada’s conventional and unconventional oil extraction, these two towns provide an interesting point of comparison: they both highlight invisible and exploited women’s labour in supporting fossil fuel industry, but also demonstrate how labourers and local politicians came to rely on systems and networks of care that women establish and maintain in order to sustain and keep safe their extractive communities. This work includes the regular daily work of feeding, laundering and caring for workers, but also mobilization in times of crisis, such as flood and fire. Drawing on archival sources from the Canadian Energy Museum and Provincial Archives as well as oral histories collected by the Energy Stories Lab, this paper highlighted the critical continuities of women’s work in oil towns.
