Leisure-oriented Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Sites for Active Citizenship

Abstract

Immigrant entrepreneurship’s social and political dimensions remain largely overlooked in leisure studies scholarship. In Canada, investigations of immigrant entrepreneurship have, with very few exceptions, been limited to the economic sphere. Through the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, critical discourse analysis, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, in this dissertation I expose and explore the intersections between multicultural citizenship discourses and leisure-oriented non-European immigrant entrepreneurship in the Windsor-Essex region of southwestern Ontario. Written in the publishable paper format, this dissertation is comprised of three stand-alone papers: paper one illustrates how citizenship discourses produced and exercised through Canada’s Multiculturalism Act (Canada, 1988) simultaneously inhibit and enable immigrants’ leisure pursuits; paper two demonstrates how non-European immigrants use leisure-based entrepreneurship to affirm and resist constraints exercised through multicultural citizenship discourses; finally, paper three demonstrates how non-European immigrants use leisure-based entrepreneurship to expand their possibilities for recognition and equal rights in the social, cultural, and political spheres of Canadian society. My findings indicate that leisure-based entrepreneurship is an important site for immigrant minorities’ civic engagement. It is a space and a medium to express and sustain distinctive cultural traditions and practices. Further, it serves as a strategy for immigrant minorities to break down barriers and create opportunities for themselves and others to participate in and experience a wide range of leisure traditions and practices. In short, through this dissertation I show that leisure-based entrepreneurship is a technique employed by immigrant minorities to assert their membership in Canadian society and to lay claims to full and equal citizenship rights. Leisure-oriented immigrant entrepreneurship, I argue, is an important site for active citizenship.