Over the summer months, the Ottawa-Gatineau network welcomed two undergraduate work-study students at uOttawa who assisted the team with various research activities pertaining to our local projects: Lina El Bakir is a second year student in a joint program of Common Law and International Development and Global Studies; Somunachi Okee-Aguguo is an international student also in second year completing a degree in Political Studies with a minor in Gender Studies. Lina worked primarily on the Transversal project and the Neighbourhood study; meanwhile Somunachi was involved in the International student project as well as the Neighbourhood study.
Resilience and International Student Mobility: The Impact of Institutional Factors on Recruitment, Retention and Pathways to Permanent Status
Over the summer, the research team has been meeting on a regular basis to discuss progress with research activities as they unfold. The systematic search of literature in French and English is now complete and our Research Assistants, Jean and Louise, are analyzing the main themes and debates in preparation for a comparative analysis of the two. The institutional scan of information relating to international students at Carleton U and uOttawa is complete and we have now begun a discursive analysis of the main documents to identify how resilience may be used or framed in relation to international students by each university. While awaiting Ethics approval, we are preparing a request to access various institutional data relating to international students at the two universities.
Transversal project: Analysis of governance structures and policy discourses shaping migration and resilience: an examination of Canada's federal, provincial and municipal governments
Significant progress was made over the summer months to complete Stage 2 of the project, which consists of an in-depth discourse analysis of selected policy documents that directly relate to immigration and settlement at the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government. A number of interesting trends and patterns are emerging from the analysis of each level of government, and we have begun to work on interprovincial, intermunicipal as well as intergovernmental comparisons. These findings were presented in preliminary form at the IGU-CAG 2018 conference in Quebec City on August 6-10.
To finalize Stage 1 and Stage 2 of the project, we will hold an all team meeting on September 4th in order to exchange insights and discuss how to present the findings in a technical report.
Neighbourhood study
The research team is excited to welcome Lily Xia as a Research assistant for the project. Lily Xia is currently a MA student in Geography at the University of Ottawa. As a research assistant for the BMRC Neighbourhood study she is assisting with compiling census profiles, conducting media analysis and ethnographic observation of the neighbourhoods. For her Master’s thesis, she is interested in studying immigrant experiences of belonging in Canada’s diverse neighbourhoods. Her other interests involve public spaces, activist movements, community building, looking at plants, petting cats, and climbing rocks.
With the help of Lily and our two work-study students, Lina and Somunachi, we were able to complete the Census profile of the selected neighbourhoods using Census data (e.g., data on various population variables, housing, income, commuting, etc.). Over the summer months, they were also busy with completing a review of the literature in French and English on immigrants, neighbourhoods and resilience. We are in the process of analyzing and summarizing the results of the review. As part of our ethnographic approach, we also visited the neighbourhoods and have undertaken an analysis of media coverage of them.
We recently obtained Ethics approval for our study and we plan to meet with our community partners to discuss research activities relating to data collection, including recruitment of participants for conducting photovoice interviews.
