Intersections of Diversity (2003)

Rethinking policy-research within a progressive framework for interpreting identity issues is a priority for the Multiculturalism Program at the Department of Canadian Heritage. The influence of multiple and overlapping factors of are becoming increasingly apparent in the kinds of community initiatives that the Program is called upon to support, whether those contributing factors include age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or socio-economic status, alongside the concerns of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion. But this type of agenda should capture the attention of other government departments and programs as well since identity and issues are becoming increasingly influential in policy areas like labour, justice, and health, to name a few. On Apri1 25-26, 2003, the Association for Canadian Studies, in partnership with the Multiculturalism Program, held a policy-research seminar on the Intersections of Diversity in Niagara Falls. This seminar was the fourth in a series of Multiculturalism Program policy-research conferences dating back to 1997. The papers selected for publication in this edition of Canadian Ethnic Studies/Etudes ethniques au Canada have been written by experts in various fields who were able to participate in that seminar. The papers were commissioned by the Multiculturalism Program in part for the purpose of providing a set of research monographs informed by the discussion at the seminar itself. Beyond the seminar, however, the authors whose articles appear in this edition were free to discuss the virtues and limitations of the policy-research that they themselves are currently working on. Seminar participants included government policy-makers, academic and government researchers, and representatives of non-governmental organisations. The seminar was informed by a set of pre-seminar policy papers that were organised by the Metropolis Project Team at Citizenship and Immigration. Metropolis hosted a number of inter-departmental policy roundtables addressing the theme of of in Ottawa in the fall of 2002, and the papers that came out of these roundtables were disseminated at the Niagara Falls seminar to facilitate discussion. Overall, therefore, the purpose of this Multiculturalism Program monograph series is to continue the process that began over a year ago at Metropolis, exploring an intersections of diversity approach to policy-research in a variety of areas for the purpose of encouraging a collaborative and mutually responsible approach to addressing identity and issues across government and society. THE GROWING SIGNIFICANCE OF INTERSECTIONS Research on within the social sciences has traditionally encouraged analysts to think in terms of singular and multiple expressions of identity. Thus, emphasising a dominant expression of identity or subsuming multiple attachments into a single identity has long been the preferred approach of academics and policy-makers in Canada. Amongst the questions to which this hierarchical approach has given rise is how dominant identifies emerge and whether a singular identity, defined as the integrated sure of various component identities, is predictive of certain types of behaviour amongst the population? On the other hand, those who stress the coexistence of various expressions of identity tend to focus on how and under what circumstances such identities relate to one another and where they overlap. Intersectionality is a term introduced by legal theorists to refer to the specific conditions that exist when one holds two or more social statuses and the results that arise from that combination. Dual and multiple attachments have long been part of the Canadian reality. Linguistic and confessional duality in Canada is reflected in the recognition of rights and the extension of services in the English and French languages as well as the provision of religious education in certain provinces to children of the Protestant and Catholic faiths. …