“Eat to Your Taste, Dress for Others:” A Critical Ethnographic Inquiry into Multiculturalism and Social Capital in the Resettlement and Integration of Syrian Refugee in a Mid-sized City in Western Canada

The settlement of Syrian refugees in Canada has attended a conversation around the politics of multiculturalism and informed a body of scholarly works on immigrant and refugee integration. With the regionalization of immigrants and refugees, settlement in small and mid-sized cities has attracted further attention. Successive federal governments implemented neoliberal policies that off-loaded much of its responsibility for refugee settlement on local communities, voluntary actors, and private organizations. The federal government adopted social capital as a public policy tool in 2004 to foreground the discourses of self-reliance and communal responsibility. Simultaneously, multicultural federal policies have been amended and continually repurposed from being a framework for a pan-Canadian conversation to a set of expectations and procedures termed the settlement of immigrants and refugees. This thesis is based on a qualitative case study at the intersection of multiculturalism and social capital in refugee settlement which employ the narrative meanings of Syrian refugees who resettled in Kelowna, BC, between 2015 and 2020. Through 20 unstructured and semi-structured interviews with Syrian refugees and private sponsors and service providers, I employ abductive and thematic analyses and present results through an ethnographic description and interpretation. While much of the literature employs evaluative frameworks and accentuates settlement outcomes, I hypothesize that settlement acquires different meanings across refugees and their host community, and that social capital and neoliberal policies, in part, serve to saddle under-resourced communities with the responsibilities of refugee settlement, and task refugees with self-care and cultural benevolence. I conclude that refugee settlement exposes multicultural policies as assimilation policies, and I provide insights into the theories of social capital and multiculturalism and their employment in neoliberal policies. This thesis is the first scholarly inquiry into the settlement and life of Syrian refugees in Kelowna, BCArts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)Community, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)Graduat