Between Culture and Profession: South Asian Immigrant Students’ Experiences of Identity, Racism, and Belonging in Ontario’s BSW Programs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the cultural and professional identity formation of South Asian immigrant students in Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) programs in Ontario, Canada. Grounded in Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, Acculturation Theory, and Professional Identity Formation, the study interrogates how Eurocentric and settler-colonial structures of social work education shape the experiences of racialized immigrant students. While existing literature highlights systemic racism and the dominance of Western epistemologies in social work curricula and practice, few studies explicitly center the voices of South Asian students navigating these tensions in Canadian contexts. Through qualitative interviews with six South Asian immigrant BSW students, this study employs thematic analysis to explore how participants negotiate cultural expectations, institutional demands, and professional legitimacy. Findings reveal five interconnected themes: Eurocentrism in curriculum and professionalism; cultural conflict and identity fragmentation; systemic racism and institutional neglect; identity negotiation and survival strategies; and colonial residue and epistemological conflict. These themes demonstrate that professional identity formation is not merely an academic or technical process, but a deeply cultural and political negotiation shaped by race, migration, and power. The analysis highlights both exclusionary dynamics and participants’ creative strategies of resistance and reimagination. Students drew upon cultural knowledge, community accountability, and acts of refusal to contest assimilationist pressures, thereby generating possibilities for more pluralistic and decolonial approaches to social work education. This thesis contributes to social work scholarship by amplifying the underrepresented voices of South Asian immigrant students and by situating professional identity formation within broader structures of colonialism and systemic racism. It calls for curricular reform, equity-oriented field education, and institutional accountability that recognize and value diverse epistemologies. In doing so, it advances the conversation on how social work education can become more inclusive, culturally responsive, and socially just.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".