Roxana Chu-Yee Ng (1951–2013) was an activist and scholar for fair migrant labour, gender and racial equality, and decolonising pedagogy. She is noted for her research on the garment industry in Canada and its relation to immigration, gender, race, and class, as well as her contributions to institutional ethnography, embodied learning and critical pedagogy.
Ng grew up in Diamond Hill, Hong Kong, and immigrated with her parents and two brothers to Vancouver, Canada in 1970. She trained in sociology and taught at the University of New Brunswick, Queen's University, and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She taught sociology, adult education, and community development, and directed the OISE Centre for Women's Studies in Education (2009–2013).
Ng was active in immigrant women's and garment workers' organising from the mid-1970s onwards. Her work informed advocacy for the protection of homeworkers in Toronto. Notably, she served as a board member of Inter Pares, and as board member then President (1994–95) of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW).
Roxana Ng was born in 1951 in Diamond Hill, a hill in the east of Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong which used to be a large urban squatter village.[a] In 1968, she left to attend The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school in York, England.[1][2] There, she was asked to change her name from Ng to Wu (the Mandarin translation) to make pronunciation easier for native English speakers. Ng refused.[2] After graduation in 1970, she moved to Vancouver with her family.[1] When they immigrated, Ng kept her last name; the rest of her family took on the Mandarin translation ("Wu").[2]
Ng trained in sociology at the University of British Columbia for her Bachelor's and Master's degrees.[1][2] During her final years of study in Vancouver, Ng dedicated a large portion of her time to caring for family during her mother's sickness.[2]
In 1977, she co-founded Vancouver Women's Research Centre (VWRC), an independent feminist organisation known for its participatory approach to research.[1][2][3] Participatory research emphasises "knowledge for action" (in order to help resolve the problem being researched) and self-awareness on the part of the researcher as a participant with power and influence in research settings.[4][b] VWRC was "founded on the principle that all research on women must start with women and must include their perception on the project, the parameters, the process, and the questions raised". VWRC's work helped identify and address problems faced by women—particularly immigrant women—in economic development, domestic violence, and sexual harassment.[1][3] Its publications included a report (1980) on sexual harassment in the workplace undertaken in collaboration with the British Columbia Federation of Labour.[5] Ng went on to set up similar centres for immigrant women across Canada.[1]
In 1978, Ng moved to Toronto for her PhD at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), which she received in 1984.[1] She was mentored by Dorothy E. Smith, and became involved with Women Working with Immigrant Women (1979) and INTERCEDE (1980) during this time.[6][7][8][9]
In the years that followed, Ng taught at the University of New Brunswick and Queen's University. She returned to OISE in 1988 as professor, first teaching sociology and later, adult education and community development.[1][2][10]
Ng directed the Centre for Women's Studies in Education (CWSE) from 2009 to 2013.[11]
On January 12, 2013, Ng passed away at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, Ontario after a short and courageous fight with cancer. She left behind her parents and two brothers.[12]
Ng is noted for her scholarship on the garment industry in Canada and its relation to immigration, gender, race, and class, as well as her contributions to institutional ethnography, embodied learning, and critical pedagogy.[2][11] One major strand of her work documented the experiences of migrant women in Canada and their identity construction in a globalised world and labour market.[1][13][14] Another strand of her work sought insight from Eastern philosophy and practice to integrate the mind-body-spirit segregation (often assuming Cartesian mind-body duality) characteristic of traditional academia and higher education.[1][15] Ng has also written on the experience of academia from the standpoint of a minority, immigrant woman.[16]
Ng's 1999 study, conducted on 30 Chinese-speaking homeworkers, found that wages were frozen at early 1980s levels (below minimum wage for homeworkers); none were receiving overtime pay (instead being paid per piece); and all reported work-related injuries. Ng estimated that there were around 8,000 women, many of them from Asia, who were homeworkers in the Toronto garment industry.[17][18][19] These homeworkers, who were paid by the piece, "regularly ha[d] their piece rate reduced as their productivity increase[d]". Many garments sewn by homeworkers "[did] not have retail and manufacturing labels, making their employers difficult to trace and regulate", such that only two of the 30 interviewed workers reported labels on garments. The study was cited at a press conference at Queen's Park.[20]
In a "representative (if non-exhaustive)" review of Ng's scholarship which contextualises and connects the major strands of Ng's work, Elaine Coburn has considered Ng "one of Canadian sociology and political economy’s most underappreciated theorists" whose research and theorising "was and remains relatively marginalised within more mainstream academic publications".[16] In regard to the unity of Ng's scholarship and activism, Coburn wrote:[21]
Ng’s work is motivated by a commitment to socially just change. Arguably, this commitment informed her efforts towards analytical rigour and clarity, since the stakes of social change do not allow for sloppy analyses that might mislead solidarity work with and for the exploited and oppressed. This rigour included a reflexive awareness of the personal costs of social change, since struggles with and for dominated actors inevitably face the countervailing powers of dominant actors whose interests are threatened by the possibilities of fundamental social transformation. Sometimes, Ng observed, even forms of civility are dangerous for social change, as when empathetic desires to maintain harmonious relationships with “those close to us” lead us to mute our critiques of social justice (Ng, 1993, p.200). Likewise, Ng examined the ways that dominated actors–and even we who think of ourselves as working for social justice–may reproduce unjust inequalities and relations of exploitation, despite our best intentions.
Ng was active in immigrant women's and garment workers' organising from the mid-1970s onwards, and "continue[d] to refine her conceptualization of race, gender, and class relations based on her organizing experiences."[22] Notably, she served as a board member of Inter Pares, and as board member then President (1994–95) of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW).[1] The organisations she supported included:[6]