Saturday, November 5, 2011

Metropolis Conference Day

I spent most of the day yesterday at the Prairie Metropolis Centre Regional conference here in Edmonton. I was given the honour of presenting a poster of my upcoming paper/dissertation chapter, anchoring the literature on immigrant and ethnic organizations in Bourdieu's theoretical framework. It was a fascinating day in many ways, even for me who is fairly knowledgeable about the subject matter at hand. The keynote address made by Howard Duncan, executive head of the Metropolis Secretariat, was particularly interesting.

He described the profound impact that Metropolis has had in bringing together researchers and practicioners from the field, allowing for very direct communications between governments, NGOs and the academia that is now, in many respects, institutionalized.

Indeed, this was reflected during the conference itself. Community organizations have an active role to play here in Canada and are represented among both the speakers and the guests, and the level of sophistication of the conversation is quite remarkable, focus on how to solve very practical issues of communication between different communites. One example was a presentation about how health care can be delivered effectively to minority communities as well, by raising the cultural competence of health care workers in direct cooperation with the community.

This environment is such a contrast from the practices I remember from Sweden. Over there, the room was habitually filled with civil servants from the local or national governments, with community representatives largely absent, and certainly absent from the list of presenters, sending a strong signal about who was regarded as an authority in the field and who was not.

It is possible that the conference practices have changed in the past six years, but I wouldn't expect any radical change of the situation, since these actors are hardly recognized as legitimate actors in the social service delivery role.

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