Many are called, few are chosen: religion and migration capabilities in Ghanaian pathways to Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the early 2000s, scholarly interest in continental African migration to Canada has grown, but existing research has focused more on integration outcomes than on the conditions that enable migration. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations among Ghanaian immigrants in Ontario, this article examines how religion – particularly Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity – shapes the migration capabilities of contemporary African migrants. It reveals that these capabilities are influenced not only by immigration laws and state policies but also by religious resources, such as social capital from transnational churches, religious concepts of the “good life,” and migratory rituals involving prayer, fasting and travel secrecy. The article contributes to the limited scholarship on Black and African immigrant religions in Canada by showing how religion empowers migration amid structural barriers. It challenges state-centric models by foregrounding how migrants draw on culturally meaningful and spiritually grounded practices to navigate uncertainty, sustain hope and transform aspiration into mobility.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".