Somali refugees arriving in Canada in the early 1990s experienced various levels of exclusion as blacks, as Muslims, and as refugees, including immigration and settlement policies that continued to structure race and gender inequality in Canada. In addition to the disadvantage of new legislation that limited their settlement as recognised Convention refugees (and legitimate residents) and placed them in a marginal position in the Canadian society, Somali women were racially targeted as members of a culture perceived as "incompatible with the Canadian".
However, Somali women did not passively accept their "fate" in Canada. At the individual level, women have engaged in creative adaptive strategies to deal with the social and economic exclusion they faced daily. Collectively, they employed various methods of activism to help the Somali refugees make sense of their fragmented lives in a new cultural, linguistic, and structural environment and to deal with the physical, social and economic displacements the community suffered from its collective refugee experiences. These women have engaged in multiple struggles to work for the " danta guud" (common good).
Drawing mainly upon oral interviews with Somali women, this dissertation traces women's agency and subjectivity since early 20th century Somalia and argues that women's personal and professional history have shaped their engagement in activities beyond their personal and daily survival. Unlike those with no formal education, educated women came with transferable skills that have helped them cope with some of the difficult experiences of dislocation and uprootedness. Hence, the formal educational and professional skills combined with the spirit of agency, resourcefulness and survival inculcated by the Somali culture enabled the participants to take leadership roles in community affairs. Unfortunately, however, because women activists have themselves been dealing with being socially and economically excluded, their efforts were often limited to "making the margins liveable".
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/29062 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Mohamed, Hamdi |
| Contributors | Craig, Beatrice,, Abdo, Nahla, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 344 p. |
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