Laura Brass will be defending her PhD dissertation proposal at 12:00PM Pacific Time on Monday, July 25th. The presentation will take place via Zoom:
All are welcome to attend.
Join Zoom Meeting (please arrive 5 minutes early)
Meeting ID: 668 2065 6749
Passcode: 553102
Supervisor: Dr. Jennifer Jenson
Committee Members: Dr. Maureen Kendrick (LLED) and Dr. Andreea Cervatiuc (LLED)
Title: Re-Skilling, Up-Skilling, and the De-Valuing of Skill: Skilled Immigrant Women’s Lived Experiences of Identity
Abstract:
Skilled immigrants—including English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers—are admitted to Canada based on a points system that considers their education, language proficiency, work experience, age, and adaptability. However, a significant number of these foreign-trained professionals encounter challenges associated with entering the Canadian workforce, re-credentialing, gaining local teaching experience, and finding a meaningful place in mainstream society. Gender differences are particularly significant for immigrant women, whose unemployment rate is almost double than that of their Canadian-born counterparts. For racialized immigrant women, systemic biases issue in racist behaviours and language-based discrimination in hiring, advancement, and in everyday life in the workplace.
While some scholarship investigates issues related to ESL learners, current research lacks a focus on women ESL teachers. My dissertation project addresses a pressing societal issue—the deskilling of highly skilled immigrant women who are overeducated for the jobs that they are doing in Canada. Specifically, it aims to identify barriers to occupational re-entry and ways of becoming adept members of new communities of practice. To do this, I ask the following questions: 1) How do participants describe their past and present lived experiences of identity (re)construction and negotiation and imagined future identities considering the materiality of their body (i.e., gender, physical appearance, skin color, (dis)ableness)? and 2) How do objects and other resources impact immigrant women’s lived experience? More specifically, how do objects help them navigate ongoing barriers and challenges?
Framed within new materialism—which puts humans and nonhumans on equal footing as agentive actants—this study employs a diffractive methodology that is not interested in differences as essences, but in where effects of differences appear. I embrace research as an assemblage, which allows me to explore identity within a knot of species—people, animals, plants, objects—that has the potential to reveal entangled, diffracted rather than top-down or bottom-up relations. The proposed qualitative case study research design will generate data through questionnaires, in-depth open-ended interviews, multimodal artifacts (e.g., pets, plants, objects, drawings, poems, songs) and photovoice. Three interviews following a past/present/future continuum will be conducted with each participant—eight to ten immigrant language teachers who self-identify as female or gender non-conforming. Objects will be used as prompts during interviews and independently as data for visual analysis. Thematic analysis is the springboard for my approach to data analysis; however, I envision my future data analysis as an open exploration, hence I will not foreclose my understanding and analysis of what the women will tell me.
This research has the potential to benefit a) the local community of immigrant women teachers participating in the study, thus serving the needs of people who are not academics; b) the larger community of immigrant teachers across Canada, by improving access to new professional opportunities; and c) the research community, by advancing socio-cultural and academic knowledge that seeks a balance between the interests of individuals, organizations, and society.