Why do people work? How are meanings of work situated within the larger biographies and contexts of their lives?

Work-Life in Canada is a five-year interdisciplinary research project that explores the diverse and changing social meanings of work through image, word, and sound. Its main outcome is a multimedia web collection featuring 100 work-life stories from working people across dozens of occupations and seven provinces and territories, including several Indigenous communities.

The Work-Life in Canada web collection will launch in May 2027 with a public symposium (both online and in person), accompanied by physical exhibits at the UAlberta FAB Gallery and the Sound Studies Institute gallery. If you would like to receive further information about the launch event, fill out the Contact US form.

Work-Life in Canada is an extension of professional artist-photographer Martin Weinhold's singular Workspace Canada collection, which holds documentary portraits of 600 working people. Since 2021, an interdisciplinary team of social science and humanities scholars has joined with Weinhold to re-visit a cross-section of his original participants plus some new faces. This new iteration, Work-Life in Canada, adds a second set of photos, a work-life story, and workplace soundscape recordings. From this work is emerging a permanently available and fully searchable public digital collection - a first-of-its-kind resource in Canada. The site is intended for multiple publics, secondary and postsecondary students, and scholars of work, family, intersectional life course, cultural studies, Indigenous studies, and social history

We developed this website to share the journey of Work-Life in Canada and to provide a taste of the web collection to come. In 2021-2023, we completed research and production in Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan. In 2024, we completed research and production in the Atlantic provinces, and in 2026, we are adding a few more in our home base of Edmonton, Alberta.

The web collection is rapidly taking shape. It will feature profiles of individual workers, multiple ways to search (e.g. by industry, by demographics), pages for exploring images and sounds, and a set of thematic exhibits.

Work-Life in Canada is Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant.