Narrators, Navigators and Negotiators: Foreign Service Officer Life Stories from Canada's Africa Refugee Resettlement Program, 1970 to 1990
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation critically examines the life stories of three Canadian Foreign Service officers, in order to tell a history about how officers "heard" and decided on the claims of refugee applicants who sought admission and resettlement to Canada through its Africa Refugee Program from the early 1970s to 1990.This period and area of focus allow the study to explore the relationship between officers' individual agency and structure in the implementation of Canadian refugee policy, and to present a hitherto under-represented part of Canada's immigration history.The research argues that the context and conditions of refugee selection can be more fully understood by explaining: the material and ideational structures within which the officers (hearers) navigated; the many types of relationships they negotiated; and the narratives they created, both about themselves and about their role in refugee selection.The history contained in this thesis does not claim to present the truth of officers' accounts or present theirs as the sole perspective, but instead makes an argument rooted in the literature that could be generalized beyond the context of the dissertation through further research.For this purpose, this work conceptualizes the officers as "narrators" (past and present), "navigators" and "negotiators."The dissertation is situated within the Historical literature on oral history, immigration to Canada, and the interdisciplinary study of the management of migration and refugee movements.It draws on substantive oral history interviews the author conducted with the three officers who were active in East-Africa between 1970 and 1990.In order to situate these life stories within the prevailing state structures of iii the time, the research draws on primary sources, including Government of Canada policy documents, the 1976 Immigration Act, Annual Reports to Parliament on Immigration Levels Plans and Ministry of Employment and Immigration Statistics.This work argues that, notwithstanding limitations on their autonomy, the degree and nature of discretion and agency that officers could exercise varied depending on the local context of implementation and particularities of the refugee applicant or situation.Together, the life stories reflect a collective narrative about the settings, conditions, constraints and interests that shaped how the officers "heard" refugee applicant stories while they implemented Canada's humanitarian and resettlement policy through the Africa Refugee Program in its earliest and formative years.The life stories put a human face on complex bureaucratic processes, and demonstrate that individual agency matters and affects outcomes in policy implementation and, occasionally, subsequent policy development.'humanity' were invaluable.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".