Dr. Monica Mi Hee Hwang is a Senior Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications, is also an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan (St. Thomas More) and a Research Associate at the Prairie Centre for Ukrainian Heritage.
Her research bridges the fields of inequality, politics, and diversity. Her work has focused on understanding ethno-racial differences in social and political trust in Canada, through the examination of socio-economic factors such as income and educational attainment and ethno-cultural markers of religious affiliation, language, and nativity status. She has also conducted research on French-English differences in civic engagement in Canada.
Her current research projects include being principal investigator on a project that explores voting options for immigrants and refugees with permanent residence status in municipal elections in the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. This project addresses the issue of non-citizen enfranchisement: foreign-born legal permanent residents who generally cannot vote in elections despite living, working, raising families, and paying taxes in host countries around the world. Through interviews with immigrants, refugees, and city officials in Saskatoon, this project will look at the possibility of incorporating voting models already existing in Australia and in several Nordic states, which have permitted non-citizens to vote in local elections.
She is co-investigator on a long-term project on Ukrainian migration to Canada. This project examines the wave of Ukrainian immigration into Canada, which occurred after Ukraine gained independence in 1991. Whilst this specific wave of Ukrainian migrants arrived in Canada under very different political, social, and economic, circumstances relative to previous waves of Ukrainian immigrants, very little is known about their economic and socio-political integration, as well as about their involvement in Ukrainian community organizations in Canada. In this three-year project, collaborators and Dr. Monica will assess the socio-economic and community experiences of the post-1991 Ukrainian group in Canada.
She is primary editor of and contributor to Social Inequality in Canada: Dimensions of Disadvantage (7th ed.) with Oxford University Press, which will be published in February 2022.