Living with uncertainty: an ethnographic study on the agency and belonging of undocumented youth in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Little is known about the lives of undocumented immigrants in Canada, and even less about the experiences of undocumented youth. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis examines the complex interplay between immigration policies and the lives of undocumented youth (14-20 years old) from Latin-American and Caribbean countries living in Montreal. There are two main objectives of this thesis. Firstly, through an examination of Canadian laws and court decisions in recent decades, it aims to investigate how immigration policies define undocumented minors as both threatening Others and vulnerable beings, rendering them voiceless. These policies of social exclusion dramatically shape these young people's lives, by frustrating their everyday interactions and limiting their access to services. Secondly, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with undocumented youth, this thesis aims to explore how these subjects, in turn, actively reinterpret their subjugated social positions and assert their agency. It demonstrates how the multiplicity of strategies developed by undocumented youth to cope with the uncertainty and liminality engendered by their migratory status, is rooted within complex relationships of interdependence and an ambivalent sense of belonging. As this thesis reveals, youths' lives and understandings of who they are cannot be understood through narratives of victimhood or resistance. Rather, youth have diverse, complex and sometimes paradoxical ways of regaining their voices and situating themselves in ambivalent and ambiguous ways of being "here". It is only through an examination of this ambiguity of youths' agency and ways of belonging, as well as through empirical research, that we can improve our ability to address this population's needs and the impact of immigration policies on their lives.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".