Seminar 12

Date: 20th May, 2014
Time: 4 - 5.15pm
Venue: Building 24, Copland, Room 1171, LJ Hume Centre

Speaker: Dr. Stephen White’s primary research interests are Canadian public opinion and political behaviour, with a focus on the political attitudes and behaviours of immigrant Canadians. Dr. White is currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science. In 2012-13 he was the Post-doctoral Fellow on Diversity and Democratic Citizenship with the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. His current research at Concordia seeks to understand the complex effects of political socialization in pre-migration and post-migration contexts on the political outlooks and participation of foreign born Canadians. He is also a co-investigator of the 2011 Saskatchewan Election Study. Dr. White is a graduate of the University of Toronto, and has previously held teaching positions at the University of Regina and the University of Ottawa. Prior to his doctoral studies, he was senior researcher at the Public Policy Research Centre, Memorial University.

Paper Title: New Immigrant Support for the Canadian Political Community: Understanding Political Integration in the Face of Economic Marginalization

Paper Abstract: The economic prospects of the Canada’s immigrants have declined steadily over the last several decades, but the country has ostensibly risen to the social and political challenges of accommodating greater diversity. This research examines some of the factors that lie behind new immigrants’ overwhelmingly positive attitudes towards Canada. It focuses on the extent to which those attitudes are grounded in immigrants’ predispositions inherited from their lives prior to migration, and in their comparative assessments of the host country and the country of origin.