Navigating otherness and belonging : A comparative case study of IMGs’ professional integration in Canada and Sweden
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the othering processes and feelings of belonging among international medical graduates (IMGs) who seek to practise medicine in Canada and Sweden. Building on the theoretical literature on othering, belonging, and the conceptualisation of status dilemmas, we explore how IMGs in Canada and Sweden negotiate their professional identity, how they cope with being othered and how they establish a path to belonging. Analysing qualitative interviews with 15 Swedish and 67 Canadian immigrant physicians, who are either practising medicine or are in the process of professional integration, we demonstrate that the construction of professional identity among IMGs necessitates constant comparison between the differences and similarities among ‘us’ – immigrant physicians, and ‘them’ – local doctors. In this process, one’s ethnicity, gender, and professional status are intertwined with the experience of being seen as ‘the Other’. We also show that in negotiating their professional status, IMGs actively interpret the meaning of being a Canadian/Swedish physician. We conclude that feelings of belonging to a professional group (Canadian or Swedish) do not seem to be static but rather fluid, ephemeral and changing, depending on the context. Our analysis suggests that more attention should be paid to the social context in which experiences of processes of being othered and feeling belonging are being constructed and interpreted by people themselves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".