Christian Churches and Immigrant Support in Canada: An Organizational Ecology Perspective

Canada receives roughly 250,000 immigrants each year, and the government spends considerable resources on assisting them to settle and integrate into Canadian society through the agencies they support. Most of these new immigrants settle in Canada’s largest cities, where churches meet specific needs that extend beyond the capacities of government agencies. In smaller centers, churches cover a wide range of services because few government supports are available. Little is known about the work of churches in Canada in spite of their importance to immigrant settlement and integration. In this study, we examine the services offered to immigrants by Canadian Christian churches. We show how the service provision of Christian churches is constrained by other organizations and groups in their environment, in ways consonant with the organizational ecology framework. Specifically, churches service the needs of immigrants by adapting to specific niche needs and by filling in gaps left by other service providers.     

Educated and underemployed: Refugee integration into the Canadian labour market

This study explores issues of access to high-status occupations in the Canadian labour market, with particular emphasis on refugees who were in professional or managerial positions prior to their arrival in Canada. The study is based on interviews with a sample of 525 adult refugees who were initially resettled in the province of Alberta between 1992 and 1997. About two thirds of the respondents came from former Yugoslavia, the remainder from countries in the Middle East, Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Despite the generally high educational attainment of these refugees, the results show that they experience, much higher rates of unemployment, part-time employment, and temporary employment than do Canadian-born individuals. A variety of structural factors operating in a segmented Canadian labour market help to explain the downward mobility of these highly qualified refugees. The policy implications of these results are examined in detail.     

Correction to: Distinguishing volumetric content from perceptual presence within a predictive processing framework

The original version of this article unfortunately has missing statement in the Acknowledgments section.     

Visually guided capture of a moving stimulus by the pigeon (Columba livia)

Although the pigeon is a popular model for studying visual perception, relatively little is known about its perception of motion. Three experiments examined the pigeons’ ability to capture a moving stimulus. In Experiment 1, the effect of manipulating stimulus speed and the length of the stimulus was examined using a simple rightward linear motion. This revealed a clear effect of length on capture and speed on errors. Errors were mostly anticipatory and there appeared to be two processes contributing to response locations: anticipatory peck bias and lag time. Using the same birds as Experiment 1, Experiment 2 assessed transfer of tracking and capture to novel linear motions. The birds were able to capture other motion directions, but they displayed a strong rightward peck bias, indicating that they had learned to peck to the right of the stimulus in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 used the same task as Experiment 2 but with naïve birds. These birds did not show the rightward bias in pecking and instead pecked more evenly around the stimulus. The combined results indicate that the pigeon can engage in anticipatory tracking and capture of a moving stimulus, and that motion properties and training experience influence capture.     

Visual and response-based navigation in the tortoise (Geochelone carbonaria)

Much research has investigated spatial cognition in mammals and birds. Evidence suggests that the hippocampus plays a critical role in this; however, reptiles do not possess a hippocampus. It has been proposed that the reptilian medial cortex plays a similar role, yet little behavioral research has directly investigated this. Consequently, this study examined the role of extramaze cues in spatial navigation by the red-footed tortoise (Geochelone carbonaria) using an eight-arm radial maze. In Experiment 1 the maze was surrounded by a black curtain on which geometrical shapes were attached. After the tortoise reached above-chance performance we introduced test sessions in which the cues were removed. Performance was unaffected by cue removal. The tortoise appeared to have developed a “turn-by-one-arm” strategy. In a second experiment the curtain was removed and the tortoise was allowed access to a rich-cue environment. The use of the turn-by-one-arm strategy was significantly reduced and the tortoise appeared to be using the extramaze cues to navigate around the apparatus. This type of response-based strategy, and the specific contexts in which it was used, has not been observed in mammals and birds, suggesting that the mechanisms served by the reptilian medial cortex do not parallel exactly those of the hippocampus.     

The emotions least relevant to politics? Queering autonomous activism

Studies of emotion and activism have often attempted to uncover ‘the emotions most relevant to politics’ (Goodwin et al., 2001). This suggests that only certain feelings are productive for activism, while other emotions have less relevance for activist theory and practice. In this paper I ask if the notion of politically ‘relevant’ emotions helps perpetuate a distinction between what is considered political and what is not. This paper builds upon a case study in which I interviewed self-identified queer-activists about their experiences of autonomous activism. These interviews reveal how the everyday emotions surrounding the ‘personal’ politics of sexuality/intimacy are often seen as either less important, a distraction from, or entirely irrelevant to ‘real’ political issues. Ultimately, I want to challenge attempts to neatly separate our intimate lives from the public sphere of activism. I argue that it can never just be a matter of politics and emotion, but also the politics of emotion (Ahmed, 2004). Therefore we should not just assume that emotions matter for resistance - without first realizing the importance of resisting these hierarchies of emotion.     

Fast mapping of multiple words: Insights into when “the information provided” does and does not equal “the information perceived”

A candidate process for explaining the rapid vocabulary acquisition during the preschool years is “fast mapping,” children's ability to sketch partial maps of a word's meaning after brief exposure. The present study examines this process for learning multiple words, testing the hypothesis that children's attention to the information critical for quickly mapping multiple words onto their referents depends on the alternatives available when the words are introduced. Fifty-eight 40-month-old children participated in one of two conditions. In both conditions, each trial for novel Word #1 presented a novel object and three familiar ones. The conditions differed in the object choices presented when novel Word #2 was introduced. Although the same information was available to children in both conditions, younger children showed significantly better learning of the new words in the successive condition than in the concurrent condition. Implications of this for age-related differences and for teaching strategies are discussed.     

Sexuality and corrections: An administrator’s perspective

Any consideration of human sexuality inevitably refers to fundamental and powerful physical, psychological, behavioral, attitudinal, and social forces that permeate many important aspects of human life and culture. As with many issues impacting society in general, these become magnified within the correctional environment.     

A Narrative Inquiry into a Female Athlete’s Experiences with Protracted Concussion Symptoms

This article explores a female university volleyball student-athlete’s experience with protracted concussion symptoms. Through the methodology of narrative inquiry, four salient themes became apparent related to Daphnée’s experiences: (a) “I felt so alone,” (b) “I had to make one of the hardest decisions of my life,” (c) “I feel like I’m in prison,” and (d) “There’s no light at the end of the tunnel.” Overall, this study offers a rare look into the impact of concussion on an individual’s athletic and academic identities, career progression, and in turn, her imagined stories of who she was and who she was becoming.