Farishta Murzban Dinshaw
Farishta Dinshaw, a social worker with the Toronto based non-profit agency COSTI, is originally from Pakistan and has been active in the settlement and immigration scene of Canada for a long time. A Zoroastrian by faith, she is active in multi-community interactions and is also an eminent author with several publications to her credit.
More information on her literary works is available here.
Canada's first graduate program devoted to advanced study of immigration policy, services and experience was launched in September 2004 at Ryerson University. This is a summary of the major research paper by Farishta Murzban Dinshaw presented in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in Immigration and Settlement Studies, 2006. The complete paper is available in the Ryerson University library. After graduation, Farishta Dinshaw returned to co-ordinate the IS8100: Field Placement and Seminar course in the same program.
Canadian Citizenship In The Imagined Future
The term 'citizenship' evokes differing degrees of intensity of emotions and reactions among those who use this word. Citizenship is often defined in legal terms, but the meaning lacks substance unless we also see it within the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that shape our everyday lives. History, race, class, gender, and religion, and the related issues of identity and equality add another dimension to the age old question of membership, "Who belongs?"
Citizenship is neither static nor one-dimensional. From a historic perspective, notions of citizenship have changed since the Athenian polis excluded women's participation in governance. France, which is one of Canada's charter nations, was instrumental in proclaiming the revolutionary notion that power rested with the people, not the monarchy. Citizenship, encompassing both its formal and substantive aspects, is constantly being transformed. It evolves through interaction between political institutions and ordinary citizens. It morphs under the influence of the media, religious factions, and financial and educational institutions. It follows then that how we define citizenship today will be different in the future.
In an effort to construct a description of Canadian citizenship in the imagined future, focussing on two components of citizenship, equality and identity, ten part-time graduate students from the 2004 cohort of the Immigration and Settlement Studies program at Ryerson University, Toronto were interviewed. They had a unique combination of lived experience, academic grounding, and professional experience related to immigration and settlement. This cohort was chosen to elicit the views of persons who have specialized knowledge and experience, so representation was not the primary concern.
The participants identified political participation and education as the two key strategies for achieving an inclusive society. They emphasized individual responsibility, including broader participation in decision making through exercising their political voice and building authentic relationships between diverse communities through conversation and personal interaction. Promoting public schools as inclusive spaces for integration and reforming school curriculum to include the contributions, experiences, perspectives, and voices of minority groups was also recommended. Participants highlighted the importance of the state's involvement in removing barriers to civic and political participation, recognizing minority group rights, providing opportunities for equitable employment and social welfare, and promoting diversity.
This research's particular focus was on the future, and one of the crucial lessons from the past, which was corroborated by participants, is that concepts of citizenship, identity and belonging have multiple meanings, are relational, and are dynamic. It should be recognized that the answer to "Who is Canadian?" and "What is Canadian?" are invariably linked and ever changing, and that indeed the answers should change if they are to remain meaningful and current. To really define "Who is Canadian?" we need to understand "What is Canadian?" even if it means challenging existing ideologies.
A critical review of multiculturalism may require re-examining the concept of Canada as a 'mosaic'. An examination of an actual mosaic shows little bits of non-overlapping pieces which lie side by side to make up a whole image. The trouble with applying this metaphor to Canada is the description of individual pieces remaining unconnected to one another. Perhaps we should rethink Canada as a 'melted mosaic' in which the perimeters of each piece melts into the perimeters of the ones around it so that the larger image becomes a fused whole. Each individual piece retains its intrinsic colour and characteristics in the centre, but the edges are blurred as it fuses with the pieces around it. The drawback to even this 'improved' model of a mosaic is that inherently a mosaic is static. The metaphor does not capture the shifting kaleidoscopic nature of the idea that what Canada is today is not what it is will be tomorrow. In fact, if what Einstein said is correct and imagination is more important than knowledge, we do not necessarily have to extend the mosaic metaphor, but can imagine a brand new model of Canadian citizenship. It might be as a three-dimensional version of a chemical compound held together by attraction of individual atoms to one another through sharing as well as exchanging of their properties or as a multicellular organism in which individual cells and groups of cells co-operate together to function as unified organism. New models are bound to have limitations too and if that is the case we will need to discard them and conceive something different. The whole idea of conceptualizing Canadian citizenship in the imagined future is that the possibilities are limitless. **