Laura Ishiguro
Relevant Degree Programs
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I supervise graduate students working on a range of topics, including related to the history of British Columbia or Canada, settler colonialism and empire, gender, race, and/or migration.
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Graduate Student Supervision
Master's Student Supervision (2010 - 2018)
Chinese migrant workers in North America have typically been regarded in two ways by historians: either as competitive threats to white workers, or as workers isolated within ethnic niches. Few scholars have examined cases where Chinese workers complemented or supported the labour of others. This thesis looks at Chinese labour in British Columbia’s salmon canning industry between 1871 and 1941, arguing that Chinese workers were foundational to white fishing jobs in the province. Drawing on company records, Government reports, newspapers, and oral interviews, I examine Chinese manual labour, labour politics, and wages as three areas where Chinese workers upheld the labour of fishers in a nominally “white” industry. As such, this thesis offers a different outlook on the structural entanglement of race and labour in British Columbia in the seventy years after the province joined the Canadian Confederation.
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Publications
- "A dreadful little glutton always telling you about food": The epistolary everyday and the making of settler colonial British Columbia (2018)
Canadian Historical Review, 99 (2), 258-283 - Northwestern North America (Canadian west) to 1900 (2016)
The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, 125-138 - “How i wish i might be near”: Distance and the epistolary family in late-nineteenth-century condolence letters (2015)
Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, 212-227
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