MacDonald E. Ighodaro. Living the Experience: Migration, Exclusion, and Anti-Racist Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
MacDonald E. Ighodaro. Living the Experience: Migration, Exclusion, and Anti-Racist Practice. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing Press, 2006. 192 pp. $ 24.95 sc. Research relating to the African refugee population in Canada is scant. MacDonald Ighodaro, professor of Sociology and Criminology at Saint Mary's University helps to fill this intellectual gap. Through a critical anti-racist lens, Ighodaro's book, Living the Experience: Migration, Exclusion and Anti-Racist Practice, sheds light on the harsh situations of many African refugees and longer-established African Canadians. Ighodaro posits that Canada's refugee policy is unjust in that it favours white-skinned Europeans over dark-skinned Africans. To buttress his claim, he points to Canada's preferential treatment toward Yugoslav refugees over Somalis in the 1990s. The former, unlike the latter, were granted permanent status in Canada and offered employment opportunities immediately upon their arrival (129). The entrance of the Yugoslavs was expedited under the family reunification program, and those who were registered as refugee claimants were speedily granted Convention Refugee status (129, 130). Yet this type of Canadian hospitality was not--and is not, argues Ighodaro--bestowed on equally needy Africans who are ... deemed inferior compared to other migrants in the minds of immigration officials (49). Readers of this book come to understand that Africans in need of protection are systematically disadvantaged since they have limited access to Canadian immigration offices where they are required to make refugee claims. Few offices operate in Africa, and the ones that exist are situated in select countries. This means, to take an example, that a single woman in peril in Khartoum, Sudan must make the treacherous 1,612 km trek and apply for Canadian resettlement in Cairo, Egypt. In Cairo, her processing period may take two to seven years compared to other regions of the world where processing times range from three months to two years (53). This grim reality represents an informal yet effective policy of containment of potential African refugees. Refugee immigration policy then, while it looks admirable on paper, is racist and xenophobic in reality. The main academic contribution of the book is found in chapters 5 and 10. In chapter 5, readers are introduced to an often ignored topic: forced and voluntary repatriation among refugees. This chapter succeeds in answering the question: what motivates refugees who are already in a safe host country to engage in self-repatriation, even if it may entail confronting once again the life-threatening conditions from which they fled? A crucial determinant is their experiences in host countries. As Ighodaro writes, It is only because life in their host countries is so horrible that many refugees repatriate, despite the horrific and dangerous conditions they know they will face there (89). …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".