Many immigrants arrive in Canada from countries with different degrees of gender inequality. While Canada has relatively high levels of gender equality, many immigrant-origin countries are characterized by high levels of inequality between men and women. Studies show that source-country gender inequality negatively impacts immigrant women's socioeconomic outcomes in the host society. However, little is known about how source-country gender inequality impacts social aspects of immigrant adjustment in Canada. This dissertation examines how source-country gender inequality impacts acculturation, structural integration and identification. My analyses of data from the Ethnic Diversity Survey and General Social Surveys find that source-country gender inequality can benefit identification when measured by sense of belonging to Canada. In other cases, it can be a barrier when acculturation is measured by financial decision-making. Further, source-country gender inequality can have little impact on the structural integration of immigrants when measured by sport participation. The results suggest that source-country gender inequality affects immigrant men and women in complex and multifaceted ways. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This master’s thesis research focuses on the experiences of people labelled/with intellectual disability in their current homes and also what they want for their future home. Few studies in Canada have focused on specifically asking this population what their ideal home looks like and acknowledging the gap between this and what their reality is. Advocacy groups in Canada and the United Nations Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities have been calling for years to better address the rights of people with disabilities and their place in the community, yet there has been little progress within Ontario towards this. Using semi-structured interviews and an arts workshop, participants were asked to think about what their life is like now and what their aspirations are for their future. The research is based on a relational model of home as more than just a physical structure and expands the definition to include the neighbourhood, relationships, and support that participants experience, which shape their home and their feelings of belonging inside and outside of it. Findings show that, while there were opportunities for agency within their homes and relationships, there are many restrictions to attaining their ideal home, including funding constraints, long wait lists, and few choices for what type of housing they receive. The findings of this study have important implications for ideas of belonging and processes of home-making within geographic research, as well as for future policy based on housing for people labelled/with intellectual disabilities in Ontario. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

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<p>  </p> <p>The symbolic reference to being in the “beyond” captures how individuals occupying the hybrid space create identities and cultures that extend beyond the dominant pathways recognized in engineering. The fundamental understanding of the cultural theory suggests that hybridity emerges when two cultural identities overlap that were previously discrete. Scholarship focused on hybridity emerged from studies centered on racial, ethnic, and gender identity and has progressed to examine hybridity in learning environments. I draw on fundamental understandings of hybridity to examine how an interdisciplinary engineering program reflects a hybrid space. </p> <p>This dissertation employed an ethnographic case study approach to investigate the following overarching research question: How is the interdisciplinary engineering program characterized as a hybrid space? The corresponding research questions examine how the interdisciplinary engineering programs shape students’ identities, agency, and belonging and what considerations faculty make concerning students identity development, belonging, and agency in the classroom? This study involved the analysis of three streams of interview data and supporting evidence from site documents retrieved from participants and publicly available sources. </p> <p>This within-case analysis resulted in the emergence of four categories of hybrid spaces—a) structural, b) cultural, c) physical, and d) pedagogical. The structural category represents how the interdisciplinary engineering program reflects a hybrid space through its policies, people, and resources. The cultural category represents how the interdisciplinary engineering program reflects a hybrid culture through its core values. The physical category represents how the interdisciplinary engineering program reflects a hybrid space through students’ access and navigation across multiple curricular and co-curricular spaces. The pedagogical category is concerned with the opportunity structures present in the curricular spaces enabling students to author and negotiate their identity as interdisciplinary engineers. Most importantly, the pedagogical category illustrates how the structural, cultural, and physical categories coalesce. By understanding this interdisciplinary engineering program, these insights can provide transferable lessons to new and emerging programs. </p>

In this study, I explore the dynamic relationships between how students feel about their school, school belonging, and to what extent they feel motivated to study a second language, L2 motivation. School belonging, which has rarely been studied in the field of applied linguistics, is widely discussed in educational psychology, and its relationship with academic achievement has been examined. However, the relationship between school belonging and L2 motivation has hardly been investigated. The first purpose of this study is to fill this gap by verifying the existence of a sense of school belonging as a psychological factor among first-year Japanese university students in an English as a foreign language context, and then to investigate its relationship with L2 motivation. I employ a convergent mixed method design in which the quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted at the same time. Quantitative data were collected through surveys from 540 first-year students in four Japanese universities, including higher- and lower-ranked universities. The qualitative data were collected through self-reflection from 176 students, comments from 413 students, and interviews with 11 students. The interviewees were selected based on their willingness to participate. The quantitative data and qualitative data were collected three times in 2018 and 2019: the first time in May and June 2018, the second time in September and October 2018, and the third time in January and February 2019. Validity evidence for the surveys was gathered through a pilot study. In the main study, school belonging was verified as one large factor mainly using Rasch analysis. The general relationship between school belonging and motivation to learn English and the changes of those relationships over the course of the year were assessed by calculating the responses to the questions with structural equation modeling (SEM). Details of students’ feelings toward their school and their connections to English learning motivation were investigated through analyses of the qualitative data. The quantitative results showed that a sense of school belonging that varies among first-year Japanese university students exists and that the relationship between school belonging and L2 motivation and their changes over the course of the year can be explained in a model in which individual differences in school belonging and L2 motivation and their changes are explained. The qualitative results support the finding that school belonging and L2 motivation are related to each other and also show that students change their school belonging and L2 motivation dynamically for a variety of reasons. Students can change their perceptions of school and language learning from positive to negative or negative to positive, and their changes can be uneven when looked at through the lens of sub-components of these constructs. By merging quantitative results and qualitative results, differences were found between the two types of data analyses. School was found to predict changes in school belonging and L2 motivation in the quantitative analyses, while different types of students, such as those who have positive school belonging and negative L2 motivation and those who have negative school belonging and positive L2 motivation were found in the same school in the qualitative analyses. Moreover, concepts of school belonging and L2 motivation were validated as hypothesized in the quantitative analyses, while unexpected ideas, such as belonging to multiple groups and loss of L2 motivation due to technological developments, were revealed by the result of the qualitative analyses. These results imply that fostering school belonging among university students can lead to studying English harder. / Teaching & Learning