1,720,989 research outputs found
Finding Housing for Resettled Refugees: Accounting for the Tangled Politics of Care in Canada’s Private Refugee Sponsorship Program
No full textThis project examines private sponsors’ experiences with finding and securing housing for privately sponsored refugees (PSR) in Ottawa prior to Operation Syrian Refugee (OSR) (before November 2015); during OSR and the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative (SRRI) (from November 2015 to January 2017); and after the SRRI (from January 2017 to December 2019). Although the PSR program has proved efficient in resettling newcomers in Canada, there has been little recognition of the real cost to sponsors; yet the significant amount of unpaid work these sponsors perform provides the very foundation of the program. I conducted interviews with eight private sponsors and one settlement worker between January and March 2020 to understand the challenges they face, and the social/personal networks on which they rely when navigating the housing market in the city. I also completed a literature review of publicly available information on Immigrant Serving Agency websites in Ottawa to use as a benchmark when comparing sponsorship programs approaches to housing. I demonstrate that sponsors’ deeply caring, but unpaid, voluntary work during their initial housing search often leads to significant overwork. This unpaid caring labour not only represents the very foundation at the basis of the PSR program, but it is also an outcome of the PSR program structure itself. I argue that without more of a structure of support in the PSR program – such as, better guidance or more intervention on the part of the government – sponsors’ feelings of overwork will continue unabated
Round Dancing the Rotunda: Decolonizing the University of Ottawa
No full textAs the number of Indigenous people/s in Canadian cities is increasing, more
research in the field of decolonization is needed to advance conceptual and empirical understanding of how to decolonize urban settler space. This thesis takes a critical qualitative and decolonization approach to investigate how Indigenous people/s experience urban settler space by using a case study of Indigenous students at the University of Ottawa. Through sharing circles, personal interviews, and reflexive journaling, I centre my participants’ experiences and perceptions of the University of Ottawa campus as space.
In the first results chapter (Chapter 3), I present my participants’ perceptions of the built environment of the campus and in turn identify the contours of a settler space. In the next chapter (Chapter 4), I examine the participants’ experiences of the campus as a social space. Their responses reveal that settler spaces are imbued with settler norms – what I call settlernormativity – that often reproduce unequal settler-Indigenous relations in and through space. Drawing from my participants’ views on how to decolonize campus space, in Chapter 5, I propose acts of decolonization in space-time as a strategy to decolonize settler urban spaces
Le rôle des facteurs environnementaux dans la migration internationale : étude de cas des immigrants haïtiens au Canada
No full textCette thèse pose un regard environnemental sur la migration internationale des Haïtiens au Canada en relevant les types de changements environnementaux qui affectent les populations urbaines et rurales tout en analysant l’interaction de ces éléments avec des facteurs non-environnementaux (politiques, économiques et sociaux). Pour cela, nous avons procédé à une collecte de données de type qualitative, dont des entrevues semi-structurées avec des informateurs clés (huit personnes), des groupes de discussion (20 participants) et des entrevues individuelles (sept participants). Cette recherche met ainsi en évidence qu’aucun participant n’a immigré uniquement à cause d’enjeux environnementaux, soulignant de la sorte qu’une telle décision résulte de l’interaction entre divers facteurs environnementaux et non-environnementaux difficilement distinguable les uns des autres. Ainsi, nous favorisons une analyse inclusive lors de l’étude de la migration environnementale en proposant le concept de « migration environnementale inter-active ». En second lieu, cette thèse se penche sur le rôle des classes sociales et des réseaux sociaux dans les stratégies d’immigration et souligne que les choix de destinations ainsi que les stratégies d’immigration (étudiants, travailleurs qualifiés, réunification familiale, demandeurs d’asile et réfugié) varient selon ces deux facteurs, surtout lorsque la destination est le Canada
Immigrants' Sense of Belonging in Diverse Neighbourhoods and Everyday Spaces
No full textIn this thesis, I examine issues of immigrant belonging, such as feelings of being accepted, recognized, and trusted, as well as having a sense of community and support. The focus is on the context of the neighbourhood in shaping immigrant sense of belonging. Neighbourhoods in Canadian cities are the locus of multiple structural forces – among these the provision of housing, services, infrastructure, and community that contribute to meeting everyday needs and feeling included, but also of discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion through processes of enclosure, neoliberal urban policies, gentrification, and revanchism. In my thesis, I use spaces of encounter as the theoretical framework to examine immigrants’ sense of belonging. Through narratives of belonging and not belonging, I aim to capture the full complexity of immigrants’ sense of belonging. To do so, I adopted a collaborative qualitative approach combining multiple methods, including critical ethnography, descriptive Census data analysis, media analysis, and photovoice interviews with 13 immigrant men and women from diverse countries of origin.
The neighbourhood selected for this study is Ledbury-Heron Gate, a low-income, immigrant neighbourhood in Ottawa. Subject to stigmatization and mass evictions, Ledbury-Heron Gate is a contentious space and the site of struggles between residents, mainstream media, developers, and city officials. Yet, many participants have found amenities, mutual support, and solidarity in the neighbourhood that they have come to appreciate and value. I present a narrative of Ledbury-Heron Gate that is not portrayed elsewhere, a complex and sometimes contradictory story of belonging and not belonging. My findings reveal that sense of belonging is not simple, and there can be simultaneous feelings of comfort and recognition combined with resentment and fear. I emphasize the participants’ accounts of agency and knowledge among the residents of
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Ledbury-Heron Gate and their ability to create spaces where they can build community and solidarity. Yet, they encounter challenges such as (in)accessibility, discrimination, and disinvestment. Based on the narratives that I will recount in this thesis, it will become clear that the participants are keenly aware of the barriers that they face; yet they refuse to let these determine their sense of belonging and support for one another. Their efforts, with proper structural support from various levels of government, local institutions, and NGOs, hold the potential to transform spaces of encounter into spaces of empowerment and connection. Their complex and at times contradicting narratives of sense of belonging and experiences of exclusion show the nuances that come from being an immigrant trying to belong to a place that is not always inclusive
Environmental Factors and Transnational Migration: A Case Study with Filipino Newcomers in Ottawa, Canada
No full textA number of international documents, NGOs and scholars have predicted that due to global environmental/climate change, the increased frequency and intensity of phenomena such as natural disasters, flooding, sea-level rise, pollution, and drought will be felt particularly in less developed regions of the world, and may force millions of people to leave their homelands. Given the far-reaching humanitarian and security concerns that have arisen with regard to the issue of environmentally-motivated migration, there have been calls for more empirical work to investigate this phenomenon, and particularly with respect to international movement. This thesis project takes a qualitative approach to investigating how environmental conditions in the Philippines are influencing migration to Ottawa, Canada. Using semi-structured focus group and personal interviews, it contributes some of the first ever empirical research on the links between environment and international migration to Canada. In taking a qualitative approach, it focuses on the perceptions and experiences of migrants themselves, and suggests that an emphasis on personal agency should be privileged to a greater extent in the environmental migration field. Additionally, by conducting research from a “receiving” country in the Global North, this research separates itself from the majority of previous empirical work in its field which has primarily been conducted in environmentally marginal areas in the Global South. In so doing, it provides a novel perspective particular to the experiences of long-distance and more permanent migrants. The results show that environmental factors are not currently perceived as migration influences for Filipino newcomers in Ottawa, although environmental factors do interact with political and economic factors in complex ways to influence migration decisions. This paper utilizes a transnational lens to demonstrate that environmental conditions in the Philippines may not act as direct migration influences, but they do impact migrants and their families through the social fields that are created between the Philippines and Canada. Previous work has primarily investigated the environment as a “push” factor of migration, making the transnational perspective an important theoretical contribution for addressing links between environmental change and remittances, family separation, and agency and power in relation to (im)mobility
Round Dancing the Rotunda: Decolonizing the University of Ottawa
No full textAs the number of Indigenous people/s in Canadian cities is increasing, more
research in the field of decolonization is needed to advance conceptual and empirical understanding of how to decolonize urban settler space. This thesis takes a critical qualitative and decolonization approach to investigate how Indigenous people/s experience urban settler space by using a case study of Indigenous students at the University of Ottawa. Through sharing circles, personal interviews, and reflexive journaling, I centre my participants’ experiences and perceptions of the University of Ottawa campus as space.
In the first results chapter (Chapter 3), I present my participants’ perceptions of the built environment of the campus and in turn identify the contours of a settler space. In the next chapter (Chapter 4), I examine the participants’ experiences of the campus as a social space. Their responses reveal that settler spaces are imbued with settler norms – what I call settlernormativity – that often reproduce unequal settler-Indigenous relations in and through space. Drawing from my participants’ views on how to decolonize campus space, in Chapter 5, I propose acts of decolonization in space-time as a strategy to decolonize settler urban spaces
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