Session Information
WERA SES 04 C, Integrating Marginalised Education Spaces into Mainstream Global Discourses
Paper Session
Contribution
Canada-China people flows are increasingly characterized by two-way movements. An increasing number of migrants moving between the two countries are skilled women in pursuit of professional careers. These women are active not only in feminized sectors, such as nursing and education (Kofman, 2004), but also in traditionally male-dominated professions (Raghuram, 2008), such as sciences and engineering. The study focuses on the experiences of Chinese women migrants with training in sciences and engineering. The objectives of the study are 1) to understand the opportunities and challenges for migrant women to develop careers in the context of transnationalism; and 2) to provide migration and labour market policy makers, employers and educators with gender-sensitive insights to facilitate migrant women’s movement, settlement and career development. The study asks three research questions: 1) how has transnational movement become a desirable option for the women? 2) how have the women managed their careers in the context of transnationalism? and 3) what social and institutional policies and practices have shaped the migration and settlement experiences and career trajectories of the women across places?
Conceptually, this study is informed by institutional ethnography (IE) (Smith, 1990; 2005) and the theoretical lens of gendered geographies of power (GGC) (Mahler & Pessar, 2001, 2006). IE is a feminist method of inquiry that starts with the experiences of people in their everyday life and proceeds to unravel the social relations, or extended courses of action, that shape experiences on the ground (Smith, 1987, 2005). In particular, IE is interested in the administrative and managerial procedures and the sequences of work done across sites to accomplish management and control. To explicate these social relations, IE approaches and traces language and texts, such as policies and media documents, as “activities organizing other activities” (Smith, 2005, p. 79), or knots of social relations. IE is suited for the study also because it commits researchers to the standpoint of people. In other words, it endeavors to make institutional processes accountable for the embodied experiences and everyday consciousness of individuals and groups. With this orientation, IE enables us to understand how marginalization and inequalities are produced through institutional processes of regulation and management.
GGC is useful for the study as it enables a fuller understanding of gender and gendered practices across place. GGC is composed of four building blocks (Mahler & Pessar, 2001). The first considers how gender ideologies and norms operate in the geographies of social and spatial scales such as individuals, families, the market and the state. The second is social location, or how individuals and groups are situated in multiple intersecting and mutually constituting hierarchies of social differences, such as class and race. The third is the agency exercised by transnational migrants. The fourth is imagination, or the cultural images, meanings, and values that circulate, and the ways in which they are appropriated by women. GGC enables us to see that while being subjected to the same institutional processes, women might be differentially articulated within the transnational social space shaping their experiences. A study of transnational space informed by GGC and IE starts with individuals’ experiences in their everyday lives. It understands individuals’ experiences in relation to their social locations within interlocking and yet fluid transnational hierarchies of power. It further identifies and traces the mediators of their experiences such as texts. Ultimately, it explicates the extended social happenings across institutional settings, such as families, communities, professions, the market, and the state, which converge to produce the women’s social space across place.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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