On March 2, 2026, Prof. Margarita Mondaca will present “Addressing Health Inequalities in Racialized and Socioeconomic Disadvantaged Areas in Sweden.” Learn more about her work.
Margarita Mondaca is an occupational therapist specializing in mental health and human rights, with over 20 years of clinical and educational experience across Latin America, Sweden, and international contexts. Her work focuses on populations facing vulnerability and marginalization, with particular attention to the ethical dimensions these conditions raise. Grounded in a commitment to human rights and equity, she emphasizes how health and social participation are shaped by broader social, economic, and historical forces. Her current research explores everyday life and vulnerability among people living in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas and subjected to reinforcing stereotyping discourses. She is also chair of the examination board and a faculty member for the European Master of Science in Occupational Therapy, and she is stepping down as chair of Occupational Science Europe after 7 years of service.
What personal experiences or early observations first drew your interest to the issues of health inequalities and social marginalization?
I grew up in a family context of several generations of working-class family members, being the first to go to university. I grew up during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973-1989), which marked the socioeconomical division in my country profoundly by installing a neoliberal socioeconomical system that shaped my immediate world. I saw every day the exhaustion of my parents, my neighbours, and my bus peers as they made an effort to provide for their families. My mother had a grocery shop, and I worked with her during my school holidays. I saw how many people had “accounts in her book” and will pay at the end of the month for their groceries. If she could do that, I could do something too, I thought. I began at a young age my commitment to marginalized adolescents in my own neighbourhoods, by creating alternative social spaces of solidarity and as a venue for mental health issues.
You discuss ‘structural neglect’ in your research studies. Could you share an example of how this manifests in the everyday lives of the people you study?
There are many examples of structural neglect that affect the participants I’m working with currently, such as racism and poverty. However, what comes to mind at the moment is the uncertainty provoked by the authorities regarding the right to live in the country. The migration office, for example, has been historically understaffed, creating a limbo of years-long wait times for decisions on permits to stay or seek asylum. Currently, the government has adopted an open anti-migration policy. Proposals to revoke permanent stay permits already granted have been presented, and even proposals for conditional citizenship for immigrants have been put forward. These waves of information and misinformation about migration policy changes reach our participants, creating fear and amplifying their uncertainty to new levels.
While your research focuses on Sweden, similar patterns of socioeconomic disadvantage and structural neglect exist worldwide. How might the insights from your work inform our understanding of such issues in Canada?
Socioeconomic and health inequalities will manifest in diverse ways worldwide. The participants I work with are often described in the literature as “hard to reach,” and in research, individual strategies are often developed to change individual behaviours or lifestyles, which, in the end, are not relevant to those with unmet needs and limited resources. One key insight in moving from individual to collective initiatives is the opportunity to strengthen social sustainability across the wider community. By anchoring both community needs and emerging opportunities with local policymakers and stakeholders, initiatives can become more relevant to specific communities.
Looking back, how has your perspective on community-engaged scholarship evolved over the course of your work?
I have become less naïve about community-engaged scholarship. In this field, we often highlight participants’ agency, resistance, solidarity, and creativity as they appear in everyday life. We do this to challenge dominant portrayals that cast them as victims or depict them in other stigmatizing ways. While this approach is important, it also carries risks. Agency can be romanticized and turned into a kind of moral evidence that seems to compensate for structural injustice. Emphasizing agency may even shift responsibility from institutions onto individuals. I have therefore grown wary of presenting agency as a comforting narrative. Instead, I try to hold agency, solidarity, and resistance alongside structural injustice—keeping both in the same frame without allowing one to obscure or neutralize the other.
You highlight the need to interrogate what remains untouched in migration scholarship. Which areas do you think are most overlooked, and what could we learn by addressing them?
Our research activities are limited to what we focus on, the type of research questions we are concerned about, the methodologies, the participants and communities we engage with and the outreach of our findings. Policy making and social and political mobilization are not necessarily affected by research in this field. As researchers, we have limited influence over broader geopolitical issues that affect the globe and create inequalities. At the same time, migration, social and health policies remain the core in determining forms of governance in daily life in our contexts. The gap between policy and migration research, especially regarding health, is enormous. By addressing these issues, we do not succumb to an increasingly dehumanizing view of migration, migrants and people living in marginalized conditions and their consequences.
For students, researchers, and community partners seeking to engage with or support marginalized communities, how can we recognize and build on these communities’ strengths rather than focusing only on their challenges or vulnerabilities?
By spending time in the communities, building trust with organizations and community members, and being transparent about your research agendas toward social justice beyond the particulars of the research topics. Trust takes time and requires accountability; for that, it is important to constantly check expectations with your partners. Capabilities and resources are often unfolded in existing practices we have access to. As researchers, we hold some power that we can use as allies of the community to channel, amplify, and validate these initiatives. I believe it is always important to assess the levels of responsibility and mobilization within the communities, again for transparency and to set adequate expectations.
