Selected Journal Articles
PhD Research
Owens (2026). Interfaces of Precarity and the Networks of Precarious Lifeworlds: Experiences of Housing, Social Supports, and Work in Youth Homelessness. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.
Drawing on interviews with unhoused young people in Toronto, this article develops interfaces of precarity as a theoretical construct to unpack the mutually constitutive relationships between precarious work, housing, and social supports. By attending to the ways these dimensions of life collide in youth’s narratives, their dynamic, multidirectional, and spatiotemporally contingent interrelations are revealed, offering empirical insights into the ways these domains are co-produced and differentially experienced. This article also contributes to scholarship on precarity by materially grounding precarity’s relational and multiscalar character within and beyond work and housing.
MA Research
Owens and Mills (2025). Conceptualizing discrimination against LGBTQ+ workers in the unbounded workplace. Canadian Geographies/Géographies canadiennes.
The workplace is a key space where LGBTQ+ people face discrimination leading to mental health distress. This paper shows how spatial attributes of work shape experiences and perceptions of discrimination, mental health, and resilience. Our findings suggest that understanding the connection between workplace discrimination and poor mental health requires a more nuanced understanding of the workplace, highlighting how workplace stressors are simultaneously emplaced in and exceed its spatiotemporal bounds.
Mills and Owens (2023). Customer abuse and aggression as labour control among LGBT workers in low-wage services. Work, Employment and Society.
This study examines the relation between customer abuse and aggression, the gender and sexual expression of workers, and labour control in precarious and low-wage service work. We argue that customer abuse and aggression is a mechanism of labour control that disciplines worker behaviour and aesthetics, directly and indirectly, leading to concealment and self-policing. Management is shown to be complicit in this dynamic, placing profitability and customer satisfaction over the safety of queer and trans workers, only intervening in instances of customer abuse and aggression when it had a limited economic impact.
Owens et al. (2022). Work-related stressors and mental health among LGBTQ workers: Results from a cross-sectional survey. PLOS ONE.
Previous attention to LGBTQ+ mental health and work has often focused on ensuring that workplaces are inclusive. This study reaffirms the importance of LGBTQ+ supportive workplaces while also demonstrating the role of precarious work in contributing to poor mental health. As a result, we call for extending beyond employer and union driven inclusion strategies to address both the concentration of LGBTQ+ people in precarious work and the degradation of work more broadly.