Social research asks questions and seeks answers about the social world. It is an exciting process of discovery, during which social researchers try to find out something new about the world of which they themselves are part. As they conduct their research, social scientists use their training and imagination to combine theories with facts in a systematic way. As a Czech-born, British-trained, Canadian sociologist, I have been profoundly influenced by my "lived experience" as a feminist and as an exile/emigrant/immigrant. In fact, much of my professional career has been spent in efforts to explain a variety of women's issues in East Central Europe to Western feminist scholars and activists.

I became an exile in Great Britain after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The years of my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in sociology in the U.K. coincided with the emergence of "second wave" feminism, with whose goals and international orientation I quickly identified. My encounter with British feminism, and my eagerness to make some use of my knowledge of the Russian language, were influential in my choice of a topic for my doctoral thesis - a comparative study of the position of women in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

I moved to Canada in 1975 to take up a full-time teaching job at Trent University. I was the first woman hired by the department, and the first to teach a course on women in the regular academic program. After revising my Ph.D. thesis and publishing it in 1979 as Women and State Socialism, I embarked in the early 1980s on a new Czechoslovakian study. It focused on the social and individual management of sexuality, fertility, childbirth and motherhood. Published in 1987, my second book, Reproduction, Medicine and the Socialist State, was once again inspired by Western feminist concerns about the medicalization of childbirth, and by my on-going association with Czechoslovakia. Another source of inspiration for this research was the birth of my two sons.

As time went on, I felt more and more at home in Canada, and my comparative research expanded not only to my adopted countries of Canada and Great Britain, but also to the U.S., Australia, and to international institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union. As I was researching women's movements and government policies, I found that in contrast to Canada and Australia, the U.N. Decade for Women was largely invisible in Great Britain. Moreover, there was no powerful British women's lobby to press for specific reforms across a range of women's issues and for greater representation of women in public life.

However, the timing of the geographic shift in my research focus was highly ironic. As I watched in Canada the unfolding of the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution that brought about the downfall of communism in 1989, I was embarking on a book (published in 1993 as Women's Equality, Demography and Public Policies: A Comparative Perspective ) that had nothing to do with East Central Europe. I did not visit postcommunist Prague until May 1991, although I have gone every year since. I have focused my research efforts there on postcommunist health care reforms in medicine and nursing, and on the lives of young, 'ordinary' Czech women who came of age in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution. [ital]Young Women of Prague [ital] was published in English and Czech editions in 1998.

My most recent research project has explored connections between various types of migration, feminism, and postmodernism. Its main focus has been on the unique experiences and perspectives of "emigre feminists" and "emigre feminism". In October 1996, I organized a national interdisciplinary conference on this topic at Trent University. One outcome was an edited volume entitled Emigre Feminism: Transnational Perspectives, which was published last year by the University of Toronto Press. Bringing together the views of expatriate, exiled and emigre feminists from various parts of the world who now reside in Canada, the collection explores themes of exile, home, displacement, and the practice of feminism across national borders.