Organizer 1
Damaris Rose
Associate Professor
INRS Urbanisation, Culture et Société, Institut national de la recherche scientifique
3465 rue Durocher, Montréal, Québec, H2X 2C6, Canada

Tel: Boîte vocale/Voice: (514) 499-4028; Centre: (514)
Fax: (514) 499-4065
Email:Damaris_Rose@INRS-UCS.Uquebec.Ca







Workshop description:
New immigrants increasingly settle in suburbs, and these new suburban residents include only low-income renters, who have varied housing needs and aspirations, but also middle-income homeowners. While some live in areas with strong residential concentrations of immigrants or minorities, others live in the same neighbourhoods as the receiving population. These trends pose complex and varied settlement service delivery and social integration issues. At the same time, many immigrants also engage in transnational social practices, raising complex questions about the spatial scales at which immigrant women and men experience citizenship and belonging. These issues must be analysed from a gendered perspective because the daily experience of suburban living is a profoundly gendered one, depending on societal and household-level divisions of paid and unpaid labour between women and men. Moreover, the state agencies responsible for settlement service delivery and integration assistance base their decisions on particular assumptions and societal norms about the roles of immigrant women in the family and in the receiving society. This workshop brings together academics, applied social researchers and practitioners from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada and the United States to explore these questions, particularly as they touch the everyday lives of immigrant women living in the suburbs. It aims both to share experiences concerning settlement and integration services, taking into account differences in local and national contexts of immigration and in the welfare state, and to begin to set out a research agenda that will lead to a better understanding of how gender influences settlement and integration dynamics in suburban areas.





Presenters / participants /other information
Participants and abstracts:
There will be five (5) paper presentations.
Each presenter will take up to 30 minutes; this includes a question period for short and factual questions. The last 30 minutes will be reserved for discussion.
If possible, the full papers will be posted on this web site before or after the conference. Otherwise, please contact the presenters by email if you would like a copy of their paper.

Paper 1. “The provision of services for immigrant women in Stockholm’s suburbs: effects of a racialized welfare state in a context of ethnic segregation.”

Irene Molina, Professor, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, Stockholm, Sweden Irene.Molina@kultgeog.uu.se


Paper 2. “How to promote the integration of immigrant and refugee women into the Finnish society”

Christina Huotari, Project Coordinator, christina.huotari@hel.fi and Silvia Rentel, Programme Manager, silvia.rentel@hel.fi, Helsingin kaupunki, sosiaalivirasto maahanmuuttoyksikkö / City of Helsinki, Unit for Immigrant Services

This presentation was made possible through the assistance of Päivi Parkkinen, Director, City of Helsinki, Social Services Department, Unit for Immigrant Services.


Paper 3. “When to consider gender in developing services for immigrants?”

Brian RAY, Policy Analyst, Migration Policy Institute, 1400 16th Street NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20036-2257 USA. bkray@migrationpolicy.org


Paper 4. “Housing strategies, ethnic minorities and women in the Oslo area”

Susanne SØHOLT, Researcher, Political Science, Norwegian Building Research Institute, Oslo. susanne.soholt@byggforsk.no


Paper 5. “Transnational Citizenship: A Case Study of Immigrant Women in Suburban Toronto”

Valerie Preston, Professor, Geography Department, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON Canada M3J 1P3, vpreston@yorku.ca and Audrey Kobayashi, Geography Department, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON Canada kobayasi@post.queensu.ca





Summary:
"New immigrants increasingly settle in suburbs, not only as low-income renters but also as middle-income homeowners. These trends pose complex service delivery and social integration issues which must be analysed from a gendered perspective because the daily experience of suburban living is a profoundly gendered one, depending on societal and household-level divisions of paid and unpaid labour between women and men."








Date: 10 September


(1 session is 3 hours)
Number of sessions: 1

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