Deportability and Kombinowanie in Canada: A Critical Ethnographic Study of ‘Irregular’ Migrant Subjectivities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project critically analyzes how the daily lives of ‘irregular’ migrants in Canada are socially produced and navigated. Building on the recent work of critical migration scholars, I study ‘illegalization’ as an exploitative sociopolitical process produced not only by laws but also state and non-state agents who draw upon legal and illegal practices to achieve their aims. Deportability is defined as the palpable sociopolitical condition generated by ‘illegalization,’ and a chief disciplinary tactic that renders migrants vulnerable and exploitable as cheap laborers for capital. While deportation studies are growing around the world, so far little is known about the daily experiences of ‘illegalized’ migrants and the subjective life produced under deportable conditions; this is especially the case in Canada, where research on ‘illegalization’ is in its early stages. This study takes a cultural psychological perspective and employs critical ethnographic methods to study the subjectivities of Polish ‘illegal’ migrants living in Toronto and Mississauga, Canada. Specifically, I examine the mixed and contradictory contexts faced by these migrants as well as how migrants interpret and navigate their unequal conditions to build their lives as non-status residents. Analyses of both interview and participant observations reveal how ‘illegal’ migrants experience systematic fears, threats, and concerns, which motivate them to develop kombinowanie and other psychological and social tactics conducive for surviving their unequal conditions. I adopt a trajectory approach to map these developments in lived time and show how various sociopolitical imperatives coalesce to generate vulnerable subjects who suffer from an adverse psychosocial condition; namely, chronic deportability. I differentiate chronic deportability from acute moments of deportability to expose the psychosocial dynamics of deportable life and trace how migrant ‘illegalization’ functions via various gradations of fear produced in recurring, cyclical forms. While the major findings confirm that deportability operates to exploit migrants who choose to work in unequal conditions, I show how migrants are not unilaterally determined by the demands of deportation regimes. Specifically, the final chapter draws upon critical psychological research to examine how migrants express more subtle, psychological forms of resistance that undermine the impositions of deportability and may lead to broader sociopolitical transformations.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".