Skills to Build the Nation
Immigrant Labour Market and Canadian Nationalism
Seiten
2025
University of Toronto Press (Verlag)
9781487521738 (ISBN)
University of Toronto Press (Verlag)
9781487521738 (ISBN)
Skills to Build the Nation explores how ideas of skill and training shape integration practices in Canada, creating conditions where skilled immigrants’ integration is contingent on performing a Canadianness that is both elusive and assimilatory.
How do discourses of “skill” and “training” shape immigrant integration, national imaginary, and skilled labour policies in Canada?
In Skills to Build the Nation, migration studies scholar Soma Chatterjee takes Canada’s Federal Skilled Worker Program as an entry point to examine how the federal policy developed through a productive contradiction: casting skilled immigrants as both essential and perpetually deficient. The federal government’s policies and programs come under critical scrutiny as the text investigates the paradoxical position of welcoming skilled immigrants while also demanding they instinctually embody an elusive, assimilatory Canadian identity.
Blending critical race theory, discourse analysis, and Marxist feminist critiques of labour, Chatterjee challenges the notion of “skill” as race-neutral and dismantles the idea that Canada’s immigration system represents a state of post-racial liberalism. By focusing on political narratives and government documents (including ministerial speeches, policy reports, and public archives), Skills to Build the Nation highlights the tensions between Canada’s global pursuit of skilled labour and its exclusionary national imaginary.
In a country with an understanding of hard work as a measure of national belonging, Chatterjee’s book is a powerful and timely intervention into the contradictions and myths of immigration, nationalism, and labour in contemporary Canada.
How do discourses of “skill” and “training” shape immigrant integration, national imaginary, and skilled labour policies in Canada?
In Skills to Build the Nation, migration studies scholar Soma Chatterjee takes Canada’s Federal Skilled Worker Program as an entry point to examine how the federal policy developed through a productive contradiction: casting skilled immigrants as both essential and perpetually deficient. The federal government’s policies and programs come under critical scrutiny as the text investigates the paradoxical position of welcoming skilled immigrants while also demanding they instinctually embody an elusive, assimilatory Canadian identity.
Blending critical race theory, discourse analysis, and Marxist feminist critiques of labour, Chatterjee challenges the notion of “skill” as race-neutral and dismantles the idea that Canada’s immigration system represents a state of post-racial liberalism. By focusing on political narratives and government documents (including ministerial speeches, policy reports, and public archives), Skills to Build the Nation highlights the tensions between Canada’s global pursuit of skilled labour and its exclusionary national imaginary.
In a country with an understanding of hard work as a measure of national belonging, Chatterjee’s book is a powerful and timely intervention into the contradictions and myths of immigration, nationalism, and labour in contemporary Canada.
Soma Chatterjee is an associate professor in the School of Social Work at York University.
Preface
Introduction
1. A Postracial Nation or Reconfigured Nationhood?
2. Canadian Experience as Skill and Deficit: A Paradox or a Productive Contradiction?
3. Naming and Civilizing the Immigrant and Exalting the White Nation
4. What Is to Be Done? On Refusal of Liberal Solutions
References
Appendices
| Erscheinungsdatum | 27.11.2025 |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | Toronto |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Gewicht | 1 g |
| Themenwelt | Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Sozialpädagogik |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie | |
| Wirtschaft | |
| ISBN-13 | 9781487521738 / 9781487521738 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich
aus dem Bereich
Substanzkunde für soziale, pädagogische und therapeutische Berufe
Buch | Softcover (2025)
Kohlhammer (Verlag)
CHF 41,95
Ein Lehr- und Praxisbuch
Buch | Softcover (2025)
Kohlhammer (Verlag)
CHF 47,60
Wissen, Haltung, Handlung
Buch | Softcover (2025)
Kohlhammer (Verlag)
CHF 49,95
