“Creating Space: Precarious Status Women Leading Local Pandemic Responses” is a collaborative, two-year project out of York University that brings together research units, researchers and partners, working on issues of equity, diversity and inclusion to advance a feminist response to the impacts of COVID-19 through systemic change.

The project, funded under Women and Gender Equality Canada’s Feminist Response and Recovery Fund, aims to centre precarious status women’s experiences to support self-determination and accelerate systemic change to reduce gender-based violence, promote workplace health and safety and increase economic security.

PerSIStence Theatre has been named a subgrantee researcher and has hired St John’s based playwright Leahdawn Helena to conduct confidential, compensated interviews with local women and gender diverse people about their experiences during the pandemic. 

These interviews were recorded, compiled, and archived through York University, and now Helena is curating a collection of monologues based on 13 of these interviews.

This collection premiered in a public staged reading at the First Light Centre for Performance and Creativity on March 22, 2024 at 7pm.
You are probably wondering, what exactly does “precarious status” mean?

Under this project, “precarious status” intersections may include, but are not limited to:
  • age
  • mental and/or physical health, illness and disability
  • immigration and/or citizenship status
  • refugee status
  • job, career, vocational status
  • housing status
  • geographic location
  • domestic, family, and marital status
  • gender and sexual diversity
  • racial and ethnic diversity
  • financial, economic status
  • front-line and essential work during the pandemic
  • anyone identifying as a member of an “at risk” population or community
St. John’s is home to a rich, diverse, and vibrant urban Indigenous community. Located on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Beothuk, the lands and waters in and around the City have traditionally served as a gathering place for the Mi’kmaq. The broader region of Newfoundland and Labrador continues to be home to diverse Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. We honour and pay respect to the past, present, and future caretakers of these territories.

We also must acknowledge the labour theft extracted from people of African descent, used to build European wealth and economies globally, and in the Canadian nation state, including Newfoundland and Labrador’s shipbuilding and cod fishery industries, through the violence of trans-Atlantic enslavement.

We thank both First Light and the office of the Vice-Provost of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism at Memorial University for crafting and sharing these words that provide us with important perspectives.