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The Department of Sociology Speaker Series presents:

Jennifer Elrick, Associate Professor of Sociology and Research Chair in Multiculturalism at McGill University
Research focus: social construction of state classifications for immigrants as well as their material and symbolic effects

Friday, November 29, 2024

1:30-3:00pm

Law Building, Room 2

Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada

This talk takes us inside the Department of Citizenship and Immigration (currently Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada) in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when Canada was facing strong economic and political pressures to change its immigration system. Specifically, it examines the role played by high-level immigration bureaucrats in crafting the move from a selection system centred on national origins to one emphasizing individual merit and social ties. It argues that the overlooked interplay between immigration case processing and policymaking provides new insights into the timing and content of this paradigmatic policy shift. This is especially important for understanding how notions of race and social class shaped new immigrant selection criteria and made Canada multicultural along middle-class lines. The talk concludes with a discussion of the contemporary implications of this historical case study.

The Department of Sociology Speaker Series presents:

Book Launch: The Stigma Matrix by Fauzia Husain

In conversation with Shobhana Xavier and Golshan Golriz

Fauzia Husain is Assistant Professor of Sociology at ºÚÁϳԹÏ×ÊÔ´.

As developing states adopt neoliberal policies, more and more working-class women find themselves pulled into the public sphere. They are pressed into wage work by a privatizing and unstable job market. Likewise, they are pulled into public roles by gender mainstreaming policies that developing states must sign on to in order to receive transnational aid. Their inclusion into the political economy is very beneficial for society, but is it also beneficial for women? In The Stigma Matrix Fauzia Husain draws on the experiences of policewomen, lady health workers, and airline attendants, all frontline workers who help the Pakistani state, and its global allies, address, surveil, and discipline veiled women citizens. These women, she finds, confront a stigma matrix: a complex of local and global, historic, and contemporary factors that work together to complicate women's integration into public life. The experiences of the three groups Husain examines reveal that inclusion requires more than quotas or special seats. This book advances critical feminist and sociological frameworks on stigma and agency showing that both concepts are made up of multiple layers of meaning, and are entangled with elite projects of hegemony.