Project Background
This project brings together as a team four university-based academics (Evangelia Tastsoglou, Edna Keeble, Alexandra Dobrowolsky, and Diane Crocker) and two community workers (Carmen Celina Moncayo and Claudette Legault). Three key elements of our work have brought us together:
- a common concern for immigrant and ethnic women and their communities in Atlantic Canada
- a common desire to find out the impacts of Canada's security and immigration laws passed in the post 9-11 environment on immigrant and ethnic community members in the Atlantic region
- a common respect for partnership, dialogue and education.
A common thread in our work is the centrality of gender analysis, not only in terms of the power relations between men and women, but also in the recognition that women (and men) do not constitute a homogenous group. Gender is crucial to Dr. Tastsoglou's research on immigration, Dr. Keeble's on security, Dr. Dobrowolsky's on citizenship and Dr. Crocker's on research methods. As part of MISA, Carmen Celina Moncayo and Claudette Legault work with immigrant and ethnic women and their communities and understand first-hand the gender issues at play.
The Team came together with a very specific objective: to find out the impacts of Canada's security and immigration laws in the post-9/11 environment. In the fall of 2002, Status of Women Canada (SWC), as part of its Policy Research Fund, sent out a call for research proposals, entitled Engendering the Human Security Agenda. SWC recognized that Canada's human security agenda badly needed both domestic and gender components and asked specifically for research on how Canada's anti-terrorist legislation, passed in the wake of 9/11, affected Canadian women. For the research team, the specific work needed was to explore how Canada's anti-terrorist legislation dovetailed with recent changes to immigration policy in impacting the lives of immigrant and ethnic communities in Atlantic Canada. Do we have in our region experiences of 'immigrant-as-security-threat' or racial and ethnic profiling since the passage of recent security and immigration legislation? How would we know these experiences? What sort of security environment exists today for immigrant and ethnic communities in Atlantic Canada? The third element that has brought us together is a common respect for partnership, dialogue and education. MISA was a primary partner in this research because the point of this research is not an academic treatise but policy recommendations. It is not surprising that Canadian Heritage under its Multiculturalism Program for Public Education Projects supported our endeavour too. This was not simply about knowing the impacts of legislation, but also doing something about it. We needed to educate ourselves, educate our communities and educate policy-makers. If immigrant and ethnic communities in Atlantic Canada are indeed presumed guilty with the passage of recent security and immigration laws, then serious questions arise regarding Canadian citizenship and our country's conceptions of equality and freedom.
The project was sponsored by Status of Women Canada, Policy Research Fund; the Department of Canadian Heritage; Saint Mary's University (SMU); and the Metropolitan Immigrant Settlement Association (MISA)
