This emerging ethnography explores the settlement experience of Bangladeshi Muslim skilled immigrants in Canada and the intersectionality of language, race, and religion in their social integration. It focuses on language, access and participation for integration and envisions a reconceptualization of language, learning and immigrants' settlement.
This emerging ethnographic study aims to explore the settlement experience of Bangladeshi Muslim skilled immigrants in Canada and the intersectionality of language, race and religion in their social integration process. Language is an essential component for immigrants' integration in host society (Boyd & Cao, 2009). However, few researchers have investigated the interplay between language and migrant learners' integration and even fewer examined skilled migrants' integration process in relation to their language learning experiences (Han, 2007; Gimpapa & Canagarajah, 2017). Furthermore, studies on Bangladeshi diaspora are almost non-existent in the academic research in Canada (Zaman & Habib, 2018). Hence, to gain an understanding of how religion and race intersects with skilled Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants' language learning, settlement and identity, this research is guided by the following question- How do skilled Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants experience their settlement in Canada and what is the role of language, race, and religion in their settlement? The theoretical framework of this research is influenced by poststructural conceptualization of language (Bourdieu, 1977, 1986; Norton, 1995), language ideology (Irvine & Gal, 1995; Woolard, 1992; Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994) and sociocultural theory of learning (Block, 2013; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Ochs, 1986). The research methodology is informed by critical theory and critical ethnographic sociolinguistic research (Heller et al, 2017). Research methods will include participant observation, fieldnotes, unstructured interviews and documents analysis. The significance of this research lies in exploring the intersectionality of language, race, and religion in the settlement of the underrepresented Bangladeshi Muslim skilled immigrants in Canada - a white settler nation. It will also offer a reconceptualization of language, learning, and immigrants' settlement journey.
