Sameness and Difference in Canada and the UK: Interrogating whiteness as a categorical marker within interpretative matrices of inclusion and exclusion

This dissertation contests the ontological social work interpretations addressing issues of societal inclusion and exclusion for migrant populations. Outcomes of societal advantage and disadvantage, of privilege and oppression, as the colloquial social work jargon designates, resulting from distributive inclusionary-exclusionary processes, are generally abstracted on identitarian categorical markers (i.e., gender, class, race) and subsequently interpreted through intersectional matrices of analysis. Categorical whiteness, taken as a fixed classification to denote fair skin colour possessed by those originating from Caucasian racial ancestries, particularly from European ethnic backgrounds, has grown to represent the universal marker grounding analyses of privilege. Yet the assumption that whiteness is the same (i.e., European, biologically marked by skin colour and privileged) across the globe, in every social circumstance, and universally traversing national communities of value, is highly problematic, since interpretations of categorical markers depend on particular geo-political and national referential frames. In comparing and contrasting the inclusionary and exclusionary logic determining aspects of societal marginalization for two populations, skilled migrants to Canada, and Romanian and Bulgarian migrants to United Kingdom (UK), this dissertation demonstrates that: 1) a universal taxonomy of whiteness as explanatory for outcomes of inclusion and exclusion does not hold within transnational contexts; 2) current understandings of ontological whiteness are constructed on a false epistemological presumption of equivalence that synonymizes colonialism with Europeanness, Europeanness with whiteness, and whiteness with colonialism; 3) the theory of intersectionality, generally used to contextualize particular outcomes of privilege and oppression, is limited in analyzing inclusionary-exclusionary processes; and it proposes, in turn: 4) the adoption of a sameness-difference dialectical reasoning to guide inclusionary/exclusionary analyses for transnational migrant populations.Ph.D.2020-11-16 00:00:0