Creative Integration: Persian Bahá’í Newcomers in New Brunswick

Our paper analyzes the experiences of Persian Bahá’ís who arrived more than twenty years ago and stayed in New Brunswick. We conducted seven interviews involving ten people. This paper presents a widely ignored aspect of immigrant life: namely, the creativity that immigrants use to overcome local residents’ hesitancy in reaching out to them in friendship. This paper further analyzes two aspects of these immigrants’ arrival that account for their success. First, the receiving Bahá’í communities integrated them immediately into the social and administrative affairs of their communities. Second, the immigrants’ recent spiritual connection to the birth place of the Bahá’í faith became the means of Canadian Bahá’ís to welcome their brothers and sisters from Iran. Résumé L’article analyse l’expérience qu’ont connu les Persans Bahá’is qui se sont installés ici, au Nouveau-Brunswick, il y a plus de vingt ans et qui y sont restés. Nous avons mené sept entrevues avec dix personnes. L’article présente une facette souvent méconnue de la vie des immigrants : notamment la créativité dont ils doivent faire preuve afin de vaincre les hésitations des résidents de la région pour se lier d’amitié avec eux. De plus, cet article analyse deux aspects de l’arrivée de ces immigrants qui favorisent leur réussite. D’abord, les communautés d’accueil bahá’í ont intégré immédiatement les immigrés dans les affaires sociales et administratives de leur communauté. Ensuite, les liens spirituels récents des immigrants envers leur pays natal ont contribué à ce que les Bahá’í Canadiens accueillent leurs frères et sœurs de l’Iran

Telling the Collective Story: Symbolic Interactionism in Narrative Research

Recent years have seen tremendous growth of interest in narrative approaches to research in both the social sciences and the humanities. Much of this research focuses on the stories of individuals and how they tell them. This article addresses the contribution of a symbolic interactionist approach to develop the “collective story” (Richardson 1990) through the use of sensitizing concepts. It focuses on research on the experience of widows, widowers, and Iranian Bahá’í refugees to Canada to demonstrate how one can use sensitizing concepts to craft a collective story of members of marginalized populations that sit at the bottom of the “hierarchy of credibility” (Becker 1967)

Learning to Be Old

Today, we have a life expectancy that earlier eras could not have dreamed of. An aging population is the hallmark of a successful society. How is it, then, that we consider one of the greatest achievements of society to be a disaster? This talk argues that the beliefs underlying ageism, based on the premise that all old people are the same, pervade contemporary thinking. Despite the fact that becoming old involves physical changes, aging has a significant social component. This presentation marks the culmination of 25 years of qualitative research in gerontology. Given the theme of the conference, the talk begins by discussing how the Trojan horse of positivist approaches is eroding the inductive nature of qualitative research. It then illustrates, based on inductive, interpretive research, how we learn to be old and accept myths associated with aging through the way people treat us

Constructing the Boundaries of Retirement for Baby-Boomer Women: Like Turning Off the Tap, or Is It?

We are at a unique point in history when an unprecedented number of women are beginning to retire. Earlier work has suggested that women have few identity concerns in retirement because they had less attachment to the labor force. In contrast, women of the baby-boomer generation are the first cohorts to have participated in significant numbers in the paid work force since the institutionalization of retirement. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews, this article explores baby-boomer women’s process of leaving the paid work force and queries what retirement means to them. It focuses on the eroding boundary between work and retirement and issues of personal and social identity for the research participants. When women retire, they navigate a number of key boundaries between full-time, paid and other work and between their own transitions and the transitions of others in their lives. The women’s social identity reflects their experience of the intersection of retirement, aging, and gender. The themes that permeate the interviews include the loss of a primary identity without having a new positive identity to claim, being retired as a conversation stopper, and experiencing the invisibility that often comes with aging. Developing a unique identity and finding new meaning as a retiree is a challenging process for baby-boomer women as they negotiate “lingering identities” to avoid crossing the identity boundary from professional to retired. The article uses the words of the research participants to explore how they construct boundaries between work and retirement, the extent of their permeability, and the impact of women’s relationships and identity on those boundaries