Places of encounter: Enhancing the social and cultural participation of official language minority immigrants and refugees in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: To compare the role of community spaces in the social and cultural integration of French-speaking immigrants and refugees in two Canadian cities located outside the Francophone province of Quebec. Francophone community spaces provide opportunities for people located in predominantly Anglophone cities to live, access services and socialize in French. In considering ways in which such community spaces could act as ‘places of encounter’ between newcomer and established populations, our primary objectives were to critically examine: 1) use of these spaces by French-speaking minority immigrants and refugees for their social and cultural participation; 2) their experiences of inclusion and exclusion within these spaces; and 3) how their experiences of engaging in daily occupations differed in relation to the unique geographic and socio-historic context of the two cities being compared.\nMethods: A total of 56 immigrants and refugees (27 women and 29 men) from a range of countries participated in eight focus groups (4 in each city) that were conducted as part of a larger instrumental case study methodology. Questions addressed their use of Francophone community spaces, their experiences of inclusion and exclusion, and aspects that facilitated their participation and engagement within the local community. Whole text analysis of focus group interviews transcribed verbatim was followed by line-by-line coding to identify key categories and themes.\nResults: Participants identified diverse challenges to their social and cultural participation within the respective Francophone minority communities examined. These challenges, and associated strategies recommended to enhance their engagement in varied occupations, will be addressed in relation to two dominant themes. The first relates to enhancing the visibility of French-speaking communities themselves, and hence of their spaces and associated opportunities for occupational participation. The second attends to the tension between the expansion of local official language minority communities and their fragmentation as related to the arrival of diverse migrant populations. The implications of the different host communities’ reception of newcomers upon their occupational possibilities will be discussed.\nImplications: Existing research on immigration to Canadian Francophone minority communities has primarily attended to governmental policies and discourses. Much less is known about the daily lives of French-speaking migrants in these communities and the role of regional context in shaping their experiences of occupation. Adopting an occupational perspective to deepen understanding of how identities are negotiated in Francophone community spaces can inform the development of promising practices to support the social participation of official language minority immigrants and refugees.\nDiscussion questions:\nIn what ways do community spaces enable participation for additional minoritized immigrant populations (e.g. faith-based communities)?\nHow can host communities best provide spaces that enable the participation and active engagement of newcomers?\nWhat role do such ‘places of encounter’ play in building migrants’ local capital and networks with members of the host community?\nKey words: integration, international migration, participation
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".