PRISM :: Browsing by Author "Banerjee, Pallavi"

Browsing by Author "Banerjee, Pallavi"

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A Body of Longing: The Erotic and Decolonial Power of the Biotext
(2023-07-19) Fernando, Tarini Nandita; Whitehead, Joshua; Dobson, Kit; Banerjee, Pallavi
A Body of Longing: The Erotic and Decolonial Power of the Biotext is a creative thesis that explores the radical potential of the biotext as a genre that defies formal and generic restrictions, especially the expectations of autobiography. Using postcolonial, affective, and literary deconstructionist theories, I explore questions such as, how does the biotext challenge formal and generic categorization? What decolonial and feminist potentials lie in the rejection of literary categories by Black, Indigenous, and writers of colour in a settler-colonial state? I investigate these questions through close analyses of experimental biotextual writings in contemporary Canadian and Indigenous English-language literatures, such as Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, Jordan Abel’s NISHGA, and, of course, my own biotextual poetry. Through my analyses, I find that the biotext, through its lack of strict generic and formal expectations, inherently encourages experimentation and the blurring of literary categories. This rejection of categorization is what allows BIPOC authors to resist readability by the Canadian state, which seeks to fetishize and restrict their stories within the colonial borders of the nation-state. In investigating the work of authors like Wah, I also theorize that one reason diasporic Asian-Canadian writers have been so foundational to the history of the biotext is that they are particularly well-positioned to use formal and generic experimentation to challenge constructions of home and identity. I also argue that visual experimentation is a key tool that heightens the decolonial breaking of generic and formal boundaries that I attempt in my poetry. Drawing strongly from Audre Lorde’s theory of the power of the erotic, my poetry collection takes up the genre of biotext and articulates my own vision for erotic, decolonial, Sri Lankan, feminist futures. Inspired by Abel’s oeuvre, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, and Joshua Whitehead’s full-metal Indigiqueer, my poetry makes intentional use of visual experimentation to challenge both the reader and state’s consumption of the text. Ultimately, I wish to contribute to the traditions created by writers like Wah and Abel, who boldly defy the colonial restrictions of genre and form, and push the biotext to ever-changing dimensions.
Open Access
The Burgeoning Field of Gender, Work & Organization: Some thoughts on the 6th Biennial International Conference of the journal Gender, Work and Organisation (GWO2010)
(2012-02-06) Banerjee, Pallavi
In the last twenty years, the Gender, Work, and Organization (GWO) Journal has made a significant contribution towards advancing the field of social science inquiry. As the GWO journal has grown in institutional strength, it has facilitated the organization of a biennial international interdisciplinary conference series, alongside an international workshop programme. Conference themes cover a wide variety of issues in the field of gender, work, and organization emerging from recent scholarship in the field. This report is an analysis of what the conference, and its contents, depicts about the field of gender, work, and organization in contemporary times. I present an overview of how the field has developed in the last 20 years, followed by an analysis of what the 6th biennial GWO conference suggests about where the field is, where it may be headed, and some consideration for future developments.
Open Access
Confronting White Femininity in Community-based Social Work Practice: An Autoethnography and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis
(2022-04-27) Hoselton, Jill; Walsh, Christine A.; El-Lahib, Yahya; Banerjee, Pallavi
Understanding the effects of White femininity on social work practice is a worthy endeavour provided the disproportionate numbers of White women that have built and occupied the professional role of social worker from the origins of colonization to present. Mainstream accounts of social work history narrate the profession to be a pursuit of well-intentioned middle- and upper-class White women, concealing the colonial operations that underpin the formation of social work as a White feminine project. Additionally, this dominant discourse conceals the racial segregation prominent in the field of social work that prevents Indigenous, Black, and other racialized people from gaining entry into the profession. While Whiteness and its effects within social work have been a subject of study, the intersection of gender and Whiteness has been minimally addressed, disregarding significant nuances that inform the relationship between the project of colonization and social work. This thesis study provides a detailed analysis of semi-structured interviews with eight White, woman-identified social workers who have practiced in community-based social work for a minimum of two years in Alberta, Canada. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis and drawing from autoethnographic techniques, I trace the ways the participants perform, witness, and disrupt the dominant discourse of White femininity. The findings illuminate the social work profession's ongoing complicity with its colonial origins, which collude with White femininity and ultimately foster practices steeped in racism. A vital need to disentangle social work from its colonial and racist scripts is emphasized.
Open Access
FOR ALL THE BEAUTIFUL SHADES OF YOU: how race, gender, and embodiment shape the retail beauty work
(2023-06) Borzoo, Sepideh; Banerjee, Pallavi; Lightman, Naomi; Nelson, Fiona
In my dissertation, I examine various forms of subordination as well as resistance along the multiple axes of identities experienced by marginalized women of colour in the beauty industry. I specifically focus on how employees navigate their positions in the retail division of cosmetic industry, both in large chain stores owned by white men and in small entrepreneurial companies owned by women of colour. Using qualitative methods —in-depth-interviews with 30 women working in the beauty stores, and discourse analysis of the social media content produced by my focal companies, I show how gender and race act as organizing structure of women’s work experiences in the business of beauty in conjunction with sexualities and immigration status. In the big box stores, the gendered and racialized processes in organizations shape and reconfigure the subjectivities of their employees. I underscore that in these stores, women employees’ personhoods, including their embodied and emotional qualities, are governed and reconstructed under, direct and indirect, organizational control. Gender discourses are activated in this feminized occupation through specific organizational policies as well as the intangible organizational culture recreated through customer-employee interactions. Bringing sexuality and class on the same level of analysis as gender, I show how hierarchy, not only between women and (gay) men, but among women with various immigration statuses, is legitimized within the aesthetic economy. Focusing on beauty companies run by Indigenous, Black, white, and immigrant women of colour entrepreneurs, I show how deploying marginal positionalities under conditions of immigration status, gender, and race marginalization serve not only to redefine these women’s identities as empowered, but also to decenter masculinity and whiteness in organizational culture through their leadership style. Located in the Canadian context, my research shows how women’s work within the business of beauty traverses across intersectional experiences of Indigenous, Black, white, and immigrant women of colour.
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From Texts to Local Tradition: A Study of Sthalapurāṇas in Konkan
(2023-09-15) Kale, Durga; Framarin, Christopher; Adamek, Wendi; Banerjee, Pallavi; Grewal, Harjeet; Feldhaus, Anne
Purāṇa genre of South-Asian texts with regional narratives, often transcend the boundaries of religious and social commentary. On these lines, people in Western India consider the site-specific texts or the Sthalapurāṇas to be the manuals of socio-religious commentary. Some of the literary narratives extend into the social relations and performance of religious practices in public space. The current project aims at querying the agency of the texts in Konkan, the region along the western coast of India. The study examines the network of social and ritual action that gets explained through the medieval Sthalapurāṇa stories as its narrative core. Three texts examined for this thesis describe the region in the modern districts of Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg as a part of the landmass created by a mythological character, Paraśurāma. While the narratives utilize literary strategies from the established templates of the Hindu and Jain texts, this study highlights the metanarratives in the texts that make for a dedicated discussion. An ethnographic study of the oral narratives in the region has been indispensable in mapping the shared religious meanings from the texts tied to the locale. Furthermore, the thesis follows Paraśurāma narrative to explore the relationship between the local landscape and various social groups. This project will highlight the trajectory of narrativization of the landscape from the premodern to modern times. With this inquiry, the project aims to lay bare the claim on the landscape extended through storytelling and oral narratives, which are often examples of curated narratives and selective memorialization. In that sense, the discussion segues into exploring the emotional geographies superimposed on the physical land. Paraśurāma’s role in creation of the land and populating the land with select individuals for the spread of religion, thus becomes the focus of storytelling in Konkan. The tripartite approach to examine the literary, oral, and archaeological data offers a lens to describe the landscape with rich, layered ascribed meanings through the years. This study will offer case-studies from a relatively understudied geographical area.
Open Access
Gender and Law Through the Lens of Land, Hunger and Terror
(Routledge, 2021-03-04) Banerjee, Pallavi; Nasiri, Pedrom
In this chapter, the authors approach the concept of gender and its relationship to the law from the perspective of 'southern theory'. Working from this standpoint, they will introduce three themes: gendered contestation over land; the gendered politics of hunger; and the social analysis of terror and queer subjectivities. In an important collection of Aboriginal writings in Australia, called Our Land is Our Life, Marcia Langton argues that in the face of colonial violence, women's system of law and older women's ties to place were crucial to community survival. Carter argues that, as such, the duties of Indigenous women as kin-persons, wives, or mothers become incomprehensible under the settler-colonial system without reference to law and legal categories. The combination of a 'southern theory' perspective with an intersectional gender analysis reveals how law shapes land rights; controls access to food for women; and configures terror, especially in the interactions of the Global South with the North.
Open Access
Gender and the Resettlement of Yazidis in Calgary: A Deep Dive in the Resettlement, Health, Carework and Education Processes
(2020-11) Banerjee, Pallavi; Coakley, Annalee L.; Narula, Bindu; Saheb Javaher, Negin; Theodore, Rowena; Thraya, Sophia
Feminist scholars of refugee and immigration studies have shown gender to be the organizing principle for resettlement experiences of newcomers. This chapter, co-authored by researchers and practitioners, focuses on how the gendered needs of the Yazidi refugee families in Calgary shaped their resettlement services and experiences. Based on keen observations by staff at the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society and the physicians and healthcare providers at the Mosaic Refugee Clinic in Calgary, combined with in-depth interviews conducted by University of Calgary researchers with nearly all Yazidi families in Calgary (45 families that include 241 family members) we focus on four key aspects: 1. Restructuring of the resettlement program by CCIS to meet the needs of Yazidi women and men, but mainly women; 2. Readjusting healthcare services by gender at the refugee clinic; 3. Care provisions in the families of the Yazidis that was fulfilled by women (internal and external to the families) care providers; and 4. Gendered and un-gendered educational outcomes for the children in Yazidi families. We argue that centring gender-based needs of the Yazidi community in the resettlement services have resulted in a feminist reorientation of the resettlement services and experiences of the Yazidis in Calgary.
Open Access
Gender Representation in Bangladeshi Textbooks: A Critical Content Analysis on English for Today
(2024-06-14) Rimpu, Sefat Jeshin; Aukerman, Maren; Banerjee, Pallavi; Kehler, Michael
This study investigated gender representation in Bangladeshi English language textbooks, in the series English for Today. It examined relative frequency of pronouns, proper nouns, gender-specific common nouns, firstness and main characters, as well as language describing activities and occupations of different genders through content analysis. Findings revealed equal gender appearance in frequency count, however, significant gender biases are prevalent in activities and occupational roles of genders. The role of the characters was often described in ways that matched patriarchal values. LGBTQIA and non-binary characters did not appear. These results indicate that, while there are some positive trends, students in Bangladesh continue to encounter problematic gender patterns in their English language textbooks.
Open Access
How Legal Problems Affect Health and the Role of Medical Legal Partnership in Canada
(2021-09) van Olm, Alexander; Ducey, Ariel; McCoy, Ted; Hardcastle, Lorian; Banerjee, Pallavi
At the moment, there is little research involving the connection between legal issues and an individual’s overall health. It makes sense that non-individual factors go into determining one’s health, such as physical environment, housing, and education. These factors are typically referred to as the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) (Mikkonen and Raphael 2012). However, at times, individuals experience issues that are legal in nature, which can in many ways affect one’s health. It is this recognition that has sparked the creation of medical-legal partnerships throughout the United States, and more recently in Canada. The health benefits of medical-legal partnerships are well documented in the United States and have created a network of medical-legal organizations, in addition to new practices in both legal and medical education (Theiss 2017; Tobin-Tyler 2011). This research explores the establishment of one of Canada’s first Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLP) between The University of Calgary’s Student Legal Assistance (SLA) and Calgary’s downtown community health center (CUPS). This research explores how legal supports included alongside healthcare service provision can work to address structural inequalities that exist in our social environment and are created or exacerbated by one’s “legal wellbeing". Interviews with healthcare and social service providers working alongside the CUPS and SLA MLP provides novel insight into the various ways legal issues can disrupt access to healthcare, interrupt health-seeking behaviours, or create unique health crises all on their own. The idea behind this is to prove that legal wellbeing is a distinct social determinant of health. The following research aims to establish a foundation for the further development of Medical-Legal Partnership throughout Canada and challenges readers to ask, what does access to justice really look like?
Open Access
Labour Market Gatekeepers: The Role of Human Resource Management Professionals in Immigrant Labour Market Integration in Alberta, Canada.
(2024-09-11) Redwood, Chene Royan; Patterson, Matt; Banerjee, Pallavi; Wallace, Jean Elizabeth; Liu, Qian; Alegria, Sharla
Despite new immigrants having higher educational attainment and an immigrant selection policy that admits “the best and the brightest,” one of Canada’s major social policy concerns is the continued deterioration of immigrants’ economic outcomes. This paradox is illustrated by data showing immigrants suffer from higher unemployment, earn less than similarly educated Canadian-born workers, face skill underutilization, and are relegated to the secondary labour market made up of low-wage, unstable jobs, lacking protections such as unemployment benefits. The underutilization of immigrant skills is economically disastrous; it costs the Canadian economy $50 billion yearly. While many studies discuss immigrants' poor labour market integration, offering explanations such as immigrant human capital factors or macroeconomic condition factors, few explore the role of meso-level organizational social actors who decide which immigrants are recruited, shortlisted, and ultimately hired. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by exploring the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) professionals in immigrant labour market integration in Alberta. Using interviews and critical discourse analysis of HRM textbooks and course outlines, I examine HRM professional's decision-making policies, processes, considerations and constraints when evaluating immigrant applications for jobs. The study reveals that immigrants, particularly racialized immigrants, face barriers to employment in the primary labour market because of the professional and institutional logic of strategic human resource management (SHRM). SHRM promoted in HRM professional education recommends that HRM professionals prioritize business objectives over equal treatment, consideration, and fairness in hiring. SHRM enables unequal power relations between hiring managers (team supervisors) and HRM professionals, which enables cultural racism to go unchecked in hiring. SHRM justifies organizational discriminatory and social closure practices as well as enables the denial of immigrant claims for employment. This is based on the perception that immigrants pose administrative burdens and financial risks stemming from the misidentification of immigrants as temporary migrants and possessing human capital and cultural deficiencies. Hiring decision-makers often do not rely on objective assessments like work sampling tests when making hiring decisions. Instead, when evaluating immigrant job applicants, they rely on racial cultural stereotypes and signals of White Canadian cultural competency as the basis for callbacks and selection.
Open Access
Lost in Translation: The (Unseen) Experiences of International Graduate Students and Families
(2021-09-24) Ramos Fandino, Isabel; Banerjee, Pallavi; Lightman, Naomi; Guo, Shibao
Despite the regular inflow of international graduate students (IGS), who contribute 21 billion dollars annually to the Canadian economy (Government of Canada, 2019), most research on migration in Canada focuses primarily on economic immigrants and refugees. Little to no research explores the lives of graduate students who exist in a liminal space between immigrants and visitors while having fewer rights and opportunities than students with Canadian citizenship. Even more invisible are the experiences of family lives of graduate students. My research fills this gap by qualitatively examining the experiences of 26 IGS and the experiences of 12 spouses of IGS at the University of Calgary. To gain a better understanding of how this population is supported on-campus, I also interviewed university staff who directly support international students. Considering how gender, race, citizenship, and family composition affect these experiences, I analyze potential singularities in the international student experience that include students’ and spouses’ access to networks, (re)division of labour in the household, and changes in the family. I also analyze the impact of race and citizenship status on IGS’s ability to achieve what I have termed in my thesis as substantive legal positionality. I argue that IGS and the families of IGS experience gendered and racialized effects at the individual and institutional level, that prevent them from accessing full membership within the university and greater community. I also utilize the concept of the ideal worker to understand how IGS and their families are impacted by the ideal-student worker notion,
Open Access
Networked Social Movements: A Critical Interrogation of Pro and Anti-Immigration Twitter Discourse in India and the USA
(2022-04) Khandelwal, Chetna; Banerjee, Pallavi; Adorjan, Michael; Shahrokni, Nazanin
Since 2014, several democratic States across the world have descended into crisis under Far Right populist leaderships that vilify immigrants to forward their ethnonationalist, religio-political, and masculinist agendas. I studied the ways in which pro and anti-immigration social movement discourse was shaped, reified, and promoted online. I historicised and examined online discourse pertaining to four social movements across two distinct national contexts, and across the political aisles in each context: Pro-immigration movement in India (anti-CAA/NRC); Anti-immigration movement in India (pro-CAA/NRC); Pro-immigration movement in USA (Families belong together protests to Abolish ICE); Anti-immigration movement in USA (Build the wall). I conducted a multimethod study beginning with a Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) (6,000 tweets) followed by a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of 600 tweets. Findings indicated that the anti-immigration movement discourse in both countries: propagated nationalistic emotion via structured weaponisation and counter-framing of “Love” for one’s country; displayed a masculinist spatial rejection of women’s dissent and support for Statist brutalities against dissidents; and engaged in historical revisionism in favour of majoritised groups, re-historicising to discursively establish masculinist hindu-nationalism in the Indian context and white supremacism in the US context. Whereas, the pro-immigration movement discourses in both countries: highlighted women led sit-ins; claimed a fight for the “soul” of India and the USA; actively historicised their own movements as well as Statist brutalities faced by immigrants and activists; and highlighted erasure of certain marginalised groups from mainstream movement discourse. Simultaneously, the use of social media technologies and tools in order to forward movement discourse were discussed in relation to each movement, embedded alongside the analysis of each movement's discourse. My work uncovers the networked ways in which social media technologies impact social movement discourse, especially in the Global South, and will contribute to social movement scholarship by employing a Southern imaginary to dismantle academic tendencies to use theories from the Global North to study data from the Global South.
Open Access
Race and Ethnicity in the Lives of LGBTQ Parents and Their Children: Perspectives from and Beyond North America
(Springer Nature Switzerland AG : LBGTQ-Parent Families, 2020-04-04) Brainer, Amy; Moore, Mignon R.; Banerjee, Pallavi
LGBTQ people of color in North America are raising children in significant numbers and are more likely than are White LGBTQ people to have children under 18 living in their homes. Emerging data point as well to significant numbers of queer parents globally, including many queer people who are raising children in the Global South and who are often left out of the discourse about LGBTQ-parent families. Rather than simply adding such families to existing models, scholars need to radically rethink the assumptions and models that we have built based on narrow samples of White, North American lesbian and gay parents. This chapter highlights theoretical insights and themes from a growing body of work on LGBTQ parenting in US communities of color and in global and transnational contexts. We explore demographic characteristics, structural inequalities, pathways to parenthood, and the rich variation in ways that heteronormative definitions of family are constructed and contested in and beyond North America. The studies we review recognize race, ethnicity, citizenship, and colonial legacies as central to the possibilities for queer family formation and to the daily lives of LGBTQ parents and their children.
Open Access
Race Talk in a Multicultural Canada: Canadian Children and the Racial Socialization Process
(2021-11) Jong, Melanie; Banerjee, Pallavi; Hagerman, Margaret; Wong, Lloyd
There is a substantial amount of sociological scholarship on racial socialization, which scholars argue creates racial distinctions and differentiation, in the American context (Myers, 2005; Pollock, 2004). However, there are limited studies addressing racial socialization or “race talk” in the Canadian context. “Race talk” or the way people talk about race and racism not only reinforces racial hierarchies, but also ensures the persistence of racism (Meyers, 2005). This body of literature shows that understanding the different racialized ideas that white and racialized children are growing up with inevitably shapes race relations between children and subsequently adults. Even less scholarly work is to be found in Canada on related topics and how multiculturalism as a policy may be shaping people’s views of race in Canada, especially pertaining to colorblind ideologies (Bonilla Silva, 2018). Given the current watershed historical moment in race relations in Canada, owing to heightened public discourse on racial injustices over the last year this research explores how families are engaging in racial socialization and the type of content that children are internalizing into their own racial consciousness. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with 23 parents and 14 children in Alberta, this analysis demonstrates some key themes in the racial socialization that Canadian children are receiving from their families. These findings demonstrate the striking differences in the ways that white and racialized families teach their kids about inequality in a multicultural Canada. Using these findings this study also makes several suggestions for families in how to challenge existing structures of inequality and work towards an anti-racist future.
Open Access
Re-Imagining Homes in New Lands: Gardening and Anti-Racist Storytelling With Newcomer Youth of Colour
(2024-08-12) Lognon, Riann; Banerjee, Pallavi; Sengupta, Pratim; Patterson, Matt
In this master’s thesis, I explore how community gardening contributes to place-making and belonging among newcomer youth of colour. While existing research largely focuses on community gardening with newcomer adults and their ways of creating home during migration, there's a notable gap concerning newcomer youth's place-making practices. This research addresses this gap by employing feminist qualitative research methods with a co-design methodology in the centre; collaborating with 18 newcomer youth of colour within a community-based research initiative, we co-created a community garden (YARI-Collective, 2024). The co-design methodology draws on critical Southern feminist axiological orientations toward deep care (Banerjee, Khandelwal, & Sanyal, 2022) and a Southern moral imaginary (Banerjee, Chacko, & Korsha, 2022). This approach resists the marginalization of newcomer youth gardeners by centering their voices in garden design decisions and within a historical context of colonialism that implicates host countries of global north in their displacement. Attending to the politically and experientially contested nature of newcomer community gardens (Strunk & Richardson, 2019; Tsu, 2021), I found that home and a sense of belonging among newcomer youth of colour emerged in the co-designed garden in four key ways. First, in centering stories of home, a collaborative approach to knowledge production that subverted neoliberal and paternalistic models of newcomer ‘deficiency’ emerged in the garden. Second, a sense of community emerged in the garden through the multiplicity of the space as engendered through re-embodying parts of home and practices of community that have been discouraged elsewhere in Canada. Third, embodied and sensorial connections to land facilitated the surfacing of memories and ways of being from home that resist the erasure of newcomer youth of colour’s subjectivities, as well as the erasure and fragmentation of land as an object of colonial dispossession. Finally, the public engagements around the garden amplified the unsilencing of newcomer youth gardeners’ voices beyond the immediate community of the research collective. In conclusion, this thesis critiques neoliberal and colonial views of newcomer gardening and integration as linear and individualistic, following instead the re-orientations offered by newcomer youth gardeners toward collective care and dignity.
Open Access
Resettling Yazidi Refugee Families in Calgary by Calgary Catholic Immigration Society (CCIS): A Home Assessment Qualitative Report 2020-21
(2022-03-25) Banerjee, Pallavi; Negin, Saheb Javaher; Thraya, Sophia; Short, Tanner; Korsha, Souzan; Khandelwal, Chetna
The following report is a summary of the results of a larger research project on the resettlement of Yazidi refugees in Calgary as part of Canada’s humanitarian response to the ISIS-led genocide in Iraq. This study is in collaboration with the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society’s (CCIS) home assessment initiative. CCIS is the main agency responsible for the resettlement of Yazidi refugees in Canada. Alongside covering the main areas of Yazidi resettlement in Canada, each section of this report combines perspectives of Yazidi refugees and perspectives of CCIS practitioners with sociological insights of the research team led by Dr. Pallavi Banerjee. The overarching goal is to provide a coherent and well-rounded understanding of nuanced challenges and successes accompanying the resettlement of this group, followed by key recommendations for CCIS and Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).
Open Access
The Role of Socio-Economic Factors in Influencing Religious Beliefs and Intergroup Attitudes of Muslim Majorities and Minorities
(2021-04-26) Ali, Syed Hammad; McCoy, Liza; Wong, Lloyd; Asatryan, Mushegh; Banerjee, Pallavi; Jamal, Aamir; Wilkins-Laflamme, Sarah
This thesis uses a wide range of secondary datasets collected by Pew Research Center (2010; 2011; 2013; 2017) to explore how Muslims’ changing socio-economic conditions influence their religious beliefs and intergroup attitudes. It questions the attempts of those critics and proponents of Islam and Muslims who essentialize Islam and assume it to be the sole/major determinant shaping Muslims’ religious perspectives and attitudes toward others. The thesis counter-argues this prevailing approach by presenting the findings of three studies. The central premise of each of the three papers is that Muslims’ varying socio-economic contexts influence their religious interpretations and intergroup relationships. The first paper uses descriptive statistics to show that variation in the Muslim population proportions in 40 different countries and the nature of their interactions with non-Muslims influence their religious views and intergroup attitudes. The next two papers use multivariate statistics and focus on studying how American Muslims’ changing socio-economic realities influence their salvific beliefs and attitudes toward same-sex relationships. The findings of the second paper reveal that cross-group friendship, high economic status, and being a Muslim convert are associated with the belief that besides Islam, other religions can also lead to eternal salvation in the hereafter. The results also reveal that not every religiosity dimension is associated with the belief that only Islam provides eternal salvation. The findings of the third paper show that men, compared with women, and more religious individuals are less likely to agree that society should accept same-sex relationships. In contrast, those from higher-income households are more likely to agree that society should accept gay and lesbian relationships. In addition, American Muslims’ religiosity-prejudice link is moderated by their income levels. Overall, the findings of this thesis indicate that Muslims’ varying socio-economic contexts influence their interpretations of Islam and attitudes toward others. Consequently, the thesis questions the underlying assumption of the essentialist approach that the contents of Islam are relatively fixed and exclusively inform Muslims’ religious opinions and intergroup attitudes.
Open Access
Social Media and Safe Spaces: A Mixed Methods Study on Identity Formation for LGBTQ+ Albertans
(2020-09-03) Kokaritis, Lindsey; McCoy, Ted; Banerjee, Pallavi; Patterson, Matt
Within literature pertaining to race and LGBTQ2IA+ identities, much of our current research is situated within a universalized hegemony of placing Whiteness, heterosexuality, and cisgender as the default, both in terms of daily experiences and conceptions of safety. The purpose of this research is to develop a more holistic understanding of LGBTQ2IA+ life as conceptualized in locations without visible role models or communities, in order to create better inclusion and representation within LGBTQ2IA+ resources in Alberta. This inclusivity must be separate from that of the ideations of metronormativity, wherein the existence of LGBTQ2IA+ lives outside cities with large LGBTQ2IA+ populations like New York, are erased. The research details the importance of community and representation, the role of technology as an identity construction site, and a specific focus on trans and POC identities as experienced simultaneously, rather than additive. Through research conducted online with an embedded mixed methods survey containing open and closed ended questions, key questions arise in regard to how sexuality, gender, and geographical location intersect to produce specific experiences online and offline for LGBTQ2IA+ Albertans. Understanding how identity is developed through online platforms for individuals that are geographically isolated, and the ways in which homophobia, transphobia, and racism are uniquely experienced in a more rural Canadian setting, highlight the need for better visibility, openness, and education regarding identity and the importance of a community that has practical and genuine applications of inclusivity.
Open Access
Technologies of Surveillance: An Intersectional Analysis of Undocumented Caribbean Women Care Workers in the Labour Markets in Canada and the U.S.
(2023-08) Thomas, Carieta Oniefa; Banerjee, Pallavi; Lightman, Naomi Anna; King, Regine U.; Wallace, Jean Elizabeth
Immigrant care workers play a considerable role in filling the gaps in care systems in the Global North. In this context, care work is increasingly stratified by gender, race, and immigration status, and racialized undocumented immigrant care workers occupy the lowest rung of the ladder in almost all cases. This study explores how government processes in the form of immigration regulation and surveillance affect the labour market participation and outcomes of undocumented immigrant women care workers from the Caribbean. The study focuses on the role pre-employment screening is playing in the management of undocumented Caribbean women care workers within the labour force in the U.S. and Canada. The study uses qualitative multi-level analysis to demonstrate the ways in which the local and relational experiences of the employers and undocumented care workers result from the matrix of domination embedded within the immigration and care work regimes. Interpretive policy analysis of [imm]ployment law at the macro level shows that governmentality practices sort immigrants into discrete categories for surveillance and control, resulting in marginalization and exploitation for those categorized as temporary, deportable, and undeserving. Analysis of 12 semi-structured interviews of care worker employers reveals that in addition to engaging in surveillance through preemployment screening of potential care workers, employers in the formal care market are also subjected to discipline and surveillance. Employers in the informal care market likewise engage in pre-employment screening, but their processes for hiring are more dependent on affective criteria and cultural matching. An analysis of 18 semi-structured interviews of undocumented care workers shows the ways the macro level immigration and employment laws, as well as the meso level employer practices, intervene in the lives of the undocumented care workers and engender their exploitation and marginalization through disciplining and techniques of the self. Using the extended case method, the study also finds three extensions of system avoidance theory based on the system avoidance practices and processes of the care workers. Beyond system avoidance practices, the study found that surveillance on the labour market disciplined the care workers into accepting exploitation.
Open Access
The Intersectional Analysis of the Resettlement Assistance Program: Policy and its Effectiveness for Resettlement of Yazidi Refugees in Calgary, Alberta
(2022) Rutherglen, Lauren; Banerjee, Pallavi
In the coming year, the UNHCR predicts that over 100 million people will be displaced due to conflict, violence, or human rights violations. As a notable humanitarian country, it is expected that Canada will continue its commitment to refugee in-take and resettlement. Interviews conducted with Yazidi refugees in Calgary, Alberta reveal the challenges of resettlement in Canada. Under the Resettlement Assistance Plan, participants discuss the difficulties of integrating into Canada focusing on income support and essential services. The interviews reveal cultural and gender gaps in the current Resettlement Assistance Program which leaves refugees to support themselves after a one-year integration timeline. Single mothers faced the largest barriers as income support did not provide enough for larger-sized families. Additionally, single mothers also faced the largest barriers when accessing essential services as the Resettlement Assistance Program is structured around a two-parent household. It is recommended that the Government of Canada restructures the Resettlement Assistance Program to focus on a wrap-around model which centers the individual and family needs of arriving refugees.