Reflecting on the Role of Non-Profits in the Refugee Claimant Process: An Inquiry into the Welcome Collective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the ‘neoliberal turn’ and the disinvesting the in social sector (1980s-2000s), over 830,000 refugees entered Canada either through the Federal Government’s Resettlement Programs or private sponsorship (Picot, 2019). Simultaneously, the government began off-loading social responsibilities to non-profit organizations to reduce government responsibility, including the support of refugee communities. Since then, non-profits have become key actors within the refugee claimant process. Drawing from ethnographic data, including in-depth interviews conducted with service providers at the Welcome Collective, a refugee aid organization in Montreal, Quebec, as well as participant observation, this thesis explores the role of non-profits in assisting individuals within the refugee claimant process. Service providers discussed their roles as not only mediators, but actors in providing both material and immaterial support to meet the needs of refugee claimants. This thesis makes use of Institutional Ethnography (IE) to investigate the importance of differentiating between vulnerability and precarity within refugee aid. Within Canada, the State follows a vulnerability narrative when managing refugee populations—focusing on the individual and their ability to integrate into the economic system, as well as society more-broadly. Conversely, precarity underscores the external circumstances acting independently of the individual that serve to hinder mobility and erase past identities. It is in engaging with both the local, the refugee community, and the trans-local, the State processes, that one can uncover non-profit’s complex role within the refugee claimant process—one that must maintain a relationship between the local communities and trans-local processes. It is through IE that the Welcome Collective’s infrastructure of care for refugee claimants becomes evident, including their use physical space, relation to the government, as well as their work with documents, that all work in tandem to destabilize the State’s vulnerability narrative and suggest a relational narrative that acknowledges the level of precarity.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| 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".