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Women of many cultures and religions find a means of coping with stress and ill health in faith-based practices, such as meditation and prayer. It is customary for Muslim women to participate in such activities, usually with a special dress code, which often includes a hijab. The headscarf ban in French and formerly in Quebec public schools not only forces Muslim female students to shed theiressentialreligious dress code, but also fails to address the resulting health consequences and to acknowledge the cultural aspects of head-covering. This paper argues that the ban on head coverings in public schools is not only an infringement on religious and cultural freedoms, and violation of human rights, but that it is also an unhealthy policy intervention, as it undermines health by restricting prayers, mindfulness and spirituality. Furthermore, the ban has taken away Muslim women's choice to wear a hijab, thus restricting a sense of self-autonomy and in turn causing additional negative health implications. By synthesising these ideas, this paper holds a novel and critical perspective that the headscarf ban policy in France should be re-examined not only because of its infringement of human rights, but also to assess the negative health impacts on affected groups. For these reasons the paper advocates a reversal of the ban, as has happened in Quebec, Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public schools have historically been key sites where children learn of and adopt a common national identity. In states where multiculturalism plays a central role in the articulation of a national identity, schools actively recognize and support the diverse cultures of their students in fulfilling this function. Canada is a state where, via federal policy, multiculturalism has been identified as a fundamental element of the national ethos. Formal education has been a key area in which the government has implemented this policy. However, public education in Canada is also committed to secularism, and this has been a cause for resistance by diverse immigrant groups. This paper examines resistance among traditional Muslim groups to Toronto school policies and practices that reflect an avowedly secular orientation. It focuses on the experiences of one Muslim group in particular, Somali immigrants, and their encounters with school policies and practices that both supported and challenged their identities. In doing so, the paper exposes the schools as sites of countervailing policies and practices within which students must nonetheless forge new and meaningful identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analysed the fertility of women who migrated to Canada before reaching age 19, using the 20 per cent sample of the Canadian censuses from 1991 to 2006. Fertility increases with age at immigration, and is particularly high for those immigrating in late adolescence. This pattern prevails regardless of the country of origin, and of whether the mother tongue of the migrants was an official language in Canada. The fertility of those for whom it was an official language is always lower on average than of those for whom it was not, but there does not seem to be a critical age at which the fertility of the former and the latter starts to diverge. Formal education has an effect: the fertility of immigrants who arrived in Canada at any age before adulthood and who were or became college graduates is similar to that of their native peers. An appendix to this paper is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2013.802007 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photographs by First Nations artists Jeffrey Thomas and Greg Staats re-view and re-vision colonial and postcolonial experience and place in Canada. The photographs presented in this paper challenge much colonial photography that depicts aboriginal peoples collectively as part of an ethnographic present engaged in traditional cultural activities or in modes of cultural assimilation. Images by Thomas and Staats are fragmentary depictions of individual aboriginal identity and experience of history in postcolonial contexts. Notably the artists' images lack the stereotypical signs of 'Indianness' that are prevalent in popular understanding of aboriginal identity and that stem from the aforementioned colonial imagery. It is argued that the artists' photographs do not represent a return of the colonial gaze documented in such historical images; rather, their work suggests alternative strategies of vision at play between First Nations artists and their audiences in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-ethnic friendships are at the heart of the immigration experience. We examine the incidence and change of co-ethnic friendship groups among 1.5 and second-generation immigrant youth in Canada using the nationally representative Ethnic Diversity Survey. We find that visible minority immigrant youth friendships are more co-ethic than those of non-visible minority immigrant youth. We also find visible minority individuals' friendship groups become more co-ethnic over time. In addition, we find differences in the pattern and direction of change across different visible minority immigrant youth groups. We interpret these findings in light of theories of assimilation and segmented assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work on the determinants of alimony awards a sparse and often speculative. The present study tests the human capital and needs models of alimony with data from Alabama. The results of Tobit regression analyses provide mixed support for both theories. For example, the human capital model was supported for duration of marriage but not husband's education. The economic need model was supported for age of wife, but not her education or presence of children. While some indicators of both models are written into Alabama's Legal Code on divorce, most indicators of both models are not predictive of alimony awards in practice. Models of alimony should perhaps also look to consensual, normative factors rather than being constrained by those that find expression in legal codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work examines the qualifications recognition and career development experiences of internationally educated engineers (immigrants to Canada) through the interaction of boundary crossing and liberal fairness ideals embedded in the qualifications recognition process. The work explored how immigrant engineers experienced boundary crossing, evidence for learning at the boundary, and the dynamic tension between immigrant engineers’ personal transitions within structural commitments to standardization and regulation. Data were collected from 18 voluntary participants who had immigrated to Canada and completed a qualifications recognition process to become registered as professional engineers in Canada and who were in active professional engineering practice. The data provided evidence of changes to immigrant engineers’ personal identity and professional practice, where these changes were forms of learning that facilitated the boundary crossing from newcomer to legitimate participant in the Canadian engineering profession. However, the data did not provide evidence of learning as collaborative co-development of new processes forallactors – newcomers and long-time Canadians alike. Instead, the resilience of the Canadian profession to true integration in favour of an expectation of assimilation of newcomer practices into the Canadian mainstream was illuminated, due to the dominance of foundational commitments in the Canadian qualifications recognition processes to liberal fairness ideals as political mechanisms of risk reduction and access to the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first sustained attempt to gather historical documentation about Scottish Gaelic-speaking people of African descent in North America. Many Scottish Gaels contemplated the consequences of assimilating into whiteness in America, in order to access wealth and privilege. Gaels were not just losing their language and culture, they were adopting an Anglophone identity during a time of rabidly racist Anglo-Saxonism in America. The folk anecdotes regarding Gaelic-speaking people of African descent examined in this article — and there must have been many more variants in oral tradition — illustrate the anxieties of immigrant Highland communities. By assimilating they would no longer be 'Other' to the institutions of the state, but their own ancestors would be 'Other' to them. Yet, at the same time, they were aware of several significant cases of the 'Other' of white identity in North America — African-Americans and Native Americans — assimilating into immigrant Highland communities and becoming Gaelic speakers. A range of folklore is explored, describing the ways in which they engage with questions of linguistic and racial identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the identity politics of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a marginalized indigenous group, in Canada. It is informed that over the past 35 years, the group has transformed itself from a peripheral community in the Canadian Arctic, with political inclusion confined to assimilation legislation and welfare policy, into a viable, codified Canadian indigenous political community. At the Arctic level, they group has successfully created a particular northern identity, thus contributing to Canada's privileged place in Arctic governance regionally, as well as its legitimacy over its Arctic waters internationally.

This study demonstrates that conventional expectations concerning patterns of residential spatial assimilation by racial minority immigrants are likely to be altered under conditions of persistent high levels of immigration. While cross-sectional studies conclude that the traditional assimilation model fits the experience of racial minority immigrants to Canada, a different picture emerges from longitudinal changes at the group level. Using a pseudo-cohort approach, it is shown that, for some racial minority immigrants, the level of residential dissimilarity from Whites in Canada's gateway cities has risen with time. Moreover, residential proximity to Whites is becoming less salient as a marker of spatial assimilation. Differences among racial minority groups in residential distribution and exposure to own-group neighbours only reflect variations in the degree of own-group preference and capacity to build affluent ethnic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparison between the cultural and the social integration policy of the United States and Canada. The two chief principles governing the cultural and social accommodation of minority groups within a state are assimilation and multiculturalism. In this context, the U.S. and Canada have opposing settlement policies. The Canadian policy has been one of multiculturalism, while the American policy thrives on the principle of assimilation. These opposing strategies of assimilation and multiculturalism lies in the fact that assimilation and multiculturalism lead to very different outcomes in terms of residential segregation.

The transethnic equivalence in the dimensional structure of acculturation for Italian Canadians and Greek Canadians was studied. The study's first phase demonstrated the multidimensional manifestation of acculturation by confirming a 3-factor structure of acculturation for both groups toward the mainstream English Canadian culture: Intrafamily English Canadian Orientation, English Canadian Media Use, and English Canadian Social Relations. Subsequently, the dimensional structures of acculturation for the two groups were tested for their equivalence. Results supported the invariance of factor structure across the 2 groups, suggesting that the extent to which acculturation is reflected in the 3 dimensions is highly similar for both. The results also demonstrate that, for both groups, the Intrafamily English Canadian dimension best reflected acculturation, followed by English Canadian Media Use and English Canadian Social Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]