Building refuge: narratives from the private sponsorship of refugees program in the Lethbridge, Alberta area

Since 1978, Canadians have been resettling refugees through Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) program. Sustained critical engagement with the PSR Program is important because of its projected growth within Canada and its use in guiding similar policy development in other countries. I conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with sponsors and refugees from the Lethbridge, Alberta area in the summer and fall of 2020. Their stories demonstrate that the sponsorship experience is influenced by refugee, sponsor, and community characteristics, the relationships between these groups, and the broader contextual setting. This project seeks to add to the growing literature on Canada’s PSR Program by exploring the sponsorship experience through the lens of sponsors and refugees who have first-hand experience and build on feminist discussions and conceptualizations of geographical scale.

Authors

• Besplug, Mariah Kelsey
• University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science

• refugees
• private sponsorship
• Canada
• feminist geography
• Refugees -- Canada
• Refugees -- Services for -- Canada -- Citizen participation
• Humanitarian assistance, Canadian
• Emigration and immigration
• Refugees -- Alberta -- Lethbridge -- Interviews
• Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program (Canada)
• Refugees -- Government policy -- Canada
• Refuge (Humanitarian assistance) -- Canada
• Canada -- Emigration and immigration -- Government policy
• Dissertations, Academic

Identifier

hdl:10133/6076

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:opus.uleth.ca:10133/6076