F17(b) - Narratives, Identity and Counter-Narratives
Date: Jun 14 | Heure: 10:15am to 11:45am | Salle: UQAM, Pavillon Hubert-Aquin, 400 Ste-Catherine E., classroom/local A-5020
Chair/Président/Présidente : Fred Guillaume Dufour (UQAM)
Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Daniel Stockemer (Université d'Ottawa)
Far from Home: Stories of immigrant soldiers in the New Zealand Defence Force: Grazia Scoppio (Royal Military College of Canada), Aimee Vieira (Independent Scholar), Sawyer Hogenkamp (University of California Los Angeles)
Abstract: Immigrants leave their homes in search of a better life, to reunite with family, for economic or humanitarian reasons, and they bring to their new country much needed human capital to fill workforce gaps, including serving in their new country’s military. Due to the paucity of research on immigrants in the armed forces (see Scoppio & Greco, 2022; Aptekar, 2023) we embarked on a qualitative study to explore different immigration and military service experiences, using narrative inquiry to elicit the stories of immigrant soldiers, aviators and sailors serving in the militaries of the Five Eyes countries: Canada, the US, Australia, the UK and New Zealand. This paper focuses on interviews with foreign-born members of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) with prior military experience. Additionally, we draw on quantitative data by the NZDF on prior military service immigrants recruited to serve in their ranks. However, as a small military, in a geographically remote location, this organization contrasts significantly with those of larger countries. Indeed, as the smallest military in the Five Eyes, the NZDF has only 15,191 regular, reserve and civilian personnel. The reality of military service in New Zealand, as reflected in individual migration experiences provides evidence of the significant challenges these migrants face in their arrival experiences, sense of belonging, expressions of loyalty, familiarity with the receiving country, experiences of exclusion, and in the institutional efforts (or lack thereof) to facilitate the transition of lateral transfer members and effectively leverage their skills. Ultimately, these narratives uncover extraordinary stories about the impact of migration on these immigrant soldiers and their families.
“It’s hard to be it if you can’t see it”: Racialized Affinity and Interest in Running for Office in Canada: Kenny Ie (University of New Brunswick - Saint John), Joanna Everitt (University of New Brunswick - Saint John), Karen Bird (McMaster University), Angelia Wagner (University of Alberta)
Abstract: Racialized minorities continue to be underrepresented in Canadian politics, though recent decades have seen improvement. Studies of legislative recruitment of underrepresented groups, such as women and minorities, identify three stages at which representation can narrow: ‘aspirants’, those who seek party nominations, ‘candidates’, those successfully selected as party nominees, and ‘legislators’, those who successfully win office (Tolley 2023). Our paper focuses on the aspirant stage, examining the question of how contexts of local candidate diversity motivate interest in running for office. We ask first about a co-ethnic ‘affinity’ effect: do racialized individuals express greater interest in running for office when they see candidates that ‘look like’ them? Second, we know that there are aggregate differences in political engagement across racialized minorities in Canada at all stages of legislative recruitment. To the extent affinity is present, how does it differ across racialized groups in Canada (South Asian, Chinese, and Black, in particular)? Finally, we consider other sociodemographic individual-level characteristics that may impact interest in running for office, including gender, and the intersections between these characteristics and race. We investigate these questions with data from a survey which oversampled racialized respondents (N = 2242) and contained an experiment presenting respondents with comparisons between candidate slates of varying diversity and a question probing interest in running for office. Our study contributes to the scant literature on race and legislative recruitment in Canada, and our understanding of how minority presence activates electoral engagement.