Practising Ideology: Chinese Immigrant Mothers' Learning in Canadian Immigration Settlement Organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examines how Chinese immigrant mothers’ learning has been socially organized in a Canadian immigration settlement organization (ISO) and how mothering as an ideology shapes immigrant mothers’ learning practice. Drawing on a feminist and anti-racist theoretical framework and a critical ethnography, this dissertation problematizes motherhood learning through exploring the ideology of mothering, unpacking the ruling relations behind the learning practice, and examining immigrant mothers’ standpoint. I argue that immigrant mothers’ everyday experience of learning, mothering and settlement, which are socially organized by the state and its agencies, are not only a cultural nexus of transnational encounters, but also social relations with race, gender and class inequalities. The findings of this dissertation were generated from three parts. First, I revisit the meaning of motherhood. I challenge the ideology of mothering, which is based on Westernized and neoliberalized ideas of “intensive mothering” (Vandenbeld Giles, 2014). I unpack the ruling relations behind Chinese immigrant mothers’ learning and find out how the ruling idea of mothering shapes Chinese immigrant mothers’ learning, settlement, mothering and everyday practice. Second, I examine the social organization of motherhood learning in Canadian immigration settlement organizations. Through critical ethnographical research at MOSAIC, a Vancouver-based immigration settlement organization, I detail how hierarchical actors including the state, program organizers, social workers, and different individuals co-participate in the making of “immigrant mothers.” I provide an account of how Canadian immigration settlement organizations play a role mediating the state’s policy and immigrants’ actual settlement practice to ensure immigrant mothers’ learning is associated with the state’s neoliberal immigration policy. Finally, I investigate Chinese immigrant mothers’ experience as standpoints to understand motherhood learning as an ideological practice. I show that the discursive and material practice of Chinese immigrant mothers’ learning contains unequal social relations, hierarchically structured by race, gender, and class differences. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of migration and motherhood in the field of adult education, women’s and gender studies, anthropology and comparative and international education. The implications for immigration policy and settlement service involve a reframing of Canadian immigration policy and suggestions on the transformative practice in local immigration settlement organizations.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".