Abstract

During the ‘neoliberal turn’ and the disinvesting the in social sector (1980s-2000s), over 830,000 refugees entered Canada either through the Federal Government’s Resettlement Programs or private sponsorship (Picot, 2019). Simultaneously, the government began off-loading social responsibilities to non-profit organizations to reduce government responsibility, including the support of refugee communities. Since then, non-profits have become key actors within the refugee claimant process. Drawing from ethnographic data, including in-depth interviews conducted with service providers at the Welcome Collective, a refugee aid organization in Montreal, Quebec, as well as participant observation, this thesis explores the role of non-profits in assisting individuals within the refugee claimant process. Service providers discussed their roles as not only mediators, but actors in providing both material and immaterial support to meet the needs of refugee claimants. This thesis makes use of Institutional Ethnography (IE) to investigate the importance of differentiating between vulnerability and precarity within refugee aid. Within Canada, the State follows a vulnerability narrative when managing refugee populations—focusing on the individual and their ability to integrate into the economic system, as well as society more-broadly. Conversely, precarity underscores the external circumstances acting independently of the individual that serve to hinder mobility and erase past identities. It is in engaging with both the local, the refugee community, and the trans-local, the State processes, that one can uncover non-profit’s complex role within the refugee claimant process—one that must maintain a relationship between the local communities and trans-local processes. It is through IE that the Welcome Collective’s infrastructure of care for refugee claimants becomes evident, including their use physical space, relation to the government, as well as their work with documents, that all work in tandem to destabilize the State’s vulnerability narrative and suggest a relational narrative that acknowledges the level of precarity.