This open access book explores the wicked problem of immigrant work integration, with specific examples from Canada. Bringing together a variety of disciplinary perspectives, it discusses immigrant ...work integration as a process of sensemaking, involving multiple actors (immigrants, organizations, communities, and governments) and multiple scales (individual, interactional, organizational, and institutional). The authors identify key players, issues, practices of support, and avenues for future research. This work contributes to enhancing the social impact of academic research by providing a comprehensive overview of the field of immigrant work integration for researchers in global mobility and organizational studies, as well as practitioners.
Changes to Canada’s immigration and refugee determination policies made since 2012 have increased the occurrence and persistence of temporariness in Canada, contributing to the systematic exclusion ...of a growing number of non-citizens, who live and work on the territory, from a wide range of rights. From the perspective of temporariness, I illustrate the striking similarities in the state’s approach to two seemingly distinct groups of non-citizens (based on their rationale for admission): low-skilled temporary foreign workers and refugee claimants. Both groups occupy a low rung in the hierarchy of rights and entitlements to citizenship in Canada, inevitably affecting their social and economic outcomes in the host society. In conclusion, I argue that there is still much to be gained by viewing these distinct groups of temporary migrants as theoretically and experientially linked, in order to design effective policy and deter Canada from repeating its dark and exclusionary migratory past.
Les changements aux politiques canadiennes d’immigration et d’admission au statut de réfugié depuis 2012 ont augmenté le caractère temporaire des séjours au Canada, contribuant ainsi à l’exclusion systématique d’accès d’un nombre croissant d’étrangers vivant et travaillant sur le territoire canadien à une variété de droits. Du point de vue de la précarité, cet article montre les ressemblances importantes dans la façon que sont considérés deux groupes distincts d’étrangers du point de leur admission: les travailleurs étrangers non qualifiés, et les demandeurs d’asile. Ces deux groupes occupent des places inférieures dans la hiérarchie des droits et de l’accès à la citoyenneté canadienne, ce qui affecte invariablement leur place sociale et économique dans la société. En conclusion, on avance qu’il y a beaucoup d’avantages à considérer ensemble, sur les plans théoriques et pratiques, ces deux groupes de migrants temporaires, afin de concevoir des politiques plus efficaces et d’éviter que le Canada répète les erreurs de sa triste et discriminatoire histoire en matière de migration.
Scholars are increasingly calling for research that “makes a difference” through theoretical, practical, societal, and educational impacts. Recognizing that academic research lags behind ...practitioners’ issues and that most academic writing is inaccessible to those who need the knowledge, some scholars are calling for embedding social impact in the research process itself. We argue that participant reflection can increase social impact by changing the way individuals think, behave, and perform. Research interviews can be interventionist with the potential to facilitate participant reflection; however, the current literature on the topic is fragmented. We combine this fragmented literature with discussions of social impact and interview techniques to propose interview principles to facilitate participant reflection toward social impact. We hope to stimulate researchers across a broad range of disciplines to think more intentionally about the impactful role of a common qualitative methodological tool, interviews, to support research participants and engage in socially meaningful research.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with exchange and international students during the COVID-19 pandemic, we elaborate on the role of Imaginative Metaphor Elicitation (IME) to generate knowledge about ...participants’ experiences while helping them make sense of and cope with a difficult situation. Imaginative metaphors allow participants to explore feelings, assumptions, and behaviors in non-threatening ways and facilitate introspection and self-awareness. We propose that imaginative metaphors help participants make their experience tangible and accessible, identify problematic assumptions, behaviors, as well as resources available to them. Some reported gaining a renewed sense of empowerment. Simultaneously, IME provides an opportunity to collect rich data while co-creating solutions for and with participants. We contribute to calls for embedding social impact in the research design by highlighting the value of IME in gaining deeper access to participants’ experiences while supporting them in taking an active role in their situations.
This article is based on an exploratory study of the implicit gender norms in work–life balance (WLB) rhetoric in ten Canadian information and communication technologies (ICT) organizations. ...Interviews with human resources (HR) managers and preliminary company website analysis revealed a masculinist and heterosexist bias in the implementation of WLB practices, legitimized by the gender composition of the workforce and the demanding yet inherently rewarding nature of the ICT sector. Participants deliberately separated care (read: childcare) from WLB (read: flexible hours and working from home), reproducing the assumption that an ‘ordinary’ worker is a man with a female partner who assumes primary responsibility for the reproductive realm. The study concludes with: (i) recommendations to increase HR's role in providing functional support for WLB practices and (ii) three future directions for research. This article contributes to a general call in feminist scholarship to apply a gendered lens to WLB practices.
Research into media constructions of migrant crises has noted when, where, and how migrants become illegalized, criminalized, and securitized, exposing the relationship between media, migration, and ...state power. News media, through narratives and lexicon, can portray some migrants as a threat to the fabric of society. This article applies the framework of policing the crisis (Hall et al., ) to discuss the discursive construction of Temporary Migrant Workers (TMWs) in Canadian media and policy. Content and textual analysis of front‐page coverage of newsprint on the Moratorium on TMWs implemented in 2014 demonstrates this process of collective problematization. The Moratorium responded to a concern of replacing Canadians, which was largely unsupported by data. Since then, news coverage has shifted their representation of TMWs from a threat to victims, signalling a critical moment to reimagine TMWs and re‐direct discussions towards granting substantive citizenship rights.
We analyse the experiences of international students living in Canada during the COVID‐19 pandemic through the lens of transnationalism that understands mobility as broadly uninterrupted, continuing ...and taken‐for‐granted, and international student migration (ISM) literature. With the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic, people had to contend with sudden border closures and stringent restrictions on all forms of travel. International students are regarded as the archetypal trans‐migrants with frequent mobility and often multiple attachments to place. We interrogate these assumptions of mobility by drawing on interview data from 13 international students in Ontario from April to June of 2020. We found that international students experienced the pandemic transnationally and faced increased challenges, which heightened their reliance on support from transnational families, and generated anxieties about their future career and mobilities. We bring transnational theories into conversation with ISM literature to better understand international students’ lived experiences in Canada during a pandemic.
Someone Kept Sacrificing Hari, Amrita
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
03/2018, Volume:
43, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
“Doing gender,” the concept proposed by Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman in 1987, has been criticized on two fronts: first, it leaves little room for gender to be undone; second, it fails to ...recognize the systemic factors that contribute to the maintenance of gender inequality. A host of feminist studies in the 1980s and 1990s established migration as a catalyst to undo gender, in that migration tends to disrupt conventional gender roles and to enable gender-atypical work-family arrangements. This study draws on the narratives of forty-two heterosexual partnered immigrants of Indian origin, living in Canada, whom I asked about their engagement with the Canadian labor market and about their gendered division of household labor. I found that this group of newcomers are not undoing gender and becoming more gender egalitarian after migrating, as earlier studies suggested they might. They experience racial discrimination in the Canadian labor market, thus destabilizing their career trajectories and making them realize that their buying power is lower in Canada, which influences them to take gender-typical paths to negotiate social reproduction. The article concludes with a call for a more race-, class-, and gender-conscious account of gender ideology in different postmigratory contexts.
The threat of statelessness has the potential to be realized anew in India with the announcement of the impending National Register of Citizens (NRC). It has propelled this populous democracy once ...again into controversy. The importance of this announcement in conjunction with the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) cannot be overstated. We draw on the case of Assam for its potential to predict the implications and consequences of a pan-national register of citizens and the threat of detention, deportation, and large-scale rendering of statelessness for those excluded from the drafts. We stress the need for India to take incremental steps to establish transparent procedures and a clear trajectory for persons rendered stateless in situ by this state project.
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