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CMS Research Conference 2025: Migration, Mobilities, and Changing Political Landscapes The CMS Research Conference 2025 unites scholars and practitioners from across Canada to explore the multifaceted relationships between migration, mobility, and shifting political contexts. Held at UBC’s Liu Institute for Global Issues, the conference features thematic panels, a policy-engaged research roundtable, and keynote storytelling presentations in partnership with CERC Migration (Toronto Metropolitan University). Highlights include the national multimedia keynote “WhereWeStand,” exploring identity and belonging through Indigenous and newcomer collaborations; panels on race and migration, climate and digital pedagogies, Chinese diasporas, boundaries of belonging, and precarious mobilities; and a roundtable on scholarly impact and policy translation.
Other University of British Columbia Activity 2025-05-01 Other Frame Backfire: The Trouble with Civil Rights Appeals in the Contemporary United States Many scholars and activists consider civil rights to be a powerful, effective way to frame diverse causes, but do civil rights claims actually resonate? Building on social movements, collective memory, and public opinion scholarship, we conceptualize civil rights claims in three non-mutually-exclusive ways: as a highly resonant “master frame” grounded in core American ideals of equal rights, as an appeal to the idealized memory of the Civil Rights Movement, and as racialized messaging that is likely to provoke backlash. Using these conceptualizations, we derive expectations about the effectiveness of civil rights claims across diverse issues, beneficiaries, and audiences, which we test using two large-scale survey experiments. Respondents viewed “civil rights” very positively in the abstract and broadly agreed about the meaning in both closed and open-ended survey responses: civil rights are about ensuring equal rights and treatment, rather than addressing material needs. Yet, surprisingly, framing contemporary problems—even unequal treatment—as civil rights violations reduced support for government intervention. Indeed, we find widespread frame backfire : civil rights framing was counterproductive across issues (material deprivation, unequal treatment), beneficiaries (African Americans, Mexican Americans, White Americans, undocumented Mexican immigrants), and audiences (liberals, conservatives, Whites, African Americans, Latinos). Given the consistently negative effects across respondents, these findings cannot be adequately explained as racialized backlash. Instead, we propose that civil rights claims evoke comparisons to the historic Civil Rights Movement, making contemporary hardships appear less significant and prompting unfavorable contrasts with idealized claims-making of the past. Our findings challenge assumptions that frames resonate when they align with audiences’ values or appeal to positive collective memories; indeed, invoking idealized memories risks undermining support for contemporary causes. University of British Columbia Publication 2025-05-16 Categorical Inequalities and Canadian Attitudes toward Positive and Negative Rights Abstract Liberal democracies are expected to provide residents with both negative rights, such as limitations against the abuse of police powers, and some range of positive (social) rights, such as access to social benefits. These rights are commonly deemed to apply equally, without respect to individuals’ ascriptive backgrounds. Existing research, often in the US context and focused on social programs, shows both support for abstract rights and group-specific prejudices. We interrogate whether similar patterns exist in Canada and innovate by directly examining negative and positive rights in the same study. Using a series of novel survey experiments, we demonstrate the degree to which categorical inequalities based on race and legal status affect public support for rights provision in Canada. Both rights are more recognized for citizens relative to out-of-status migrants, and legal status at times interacts with racialized minority status. Rights appear far from universal in the minds of Canadians. University of British Columbia Publication 2024-05-13 Inactive and Quiescent? Immigrant Collective Action in Comparative Perspective, 1960 to 1995 Social movement mobilization by and on behalf of immigrants occurs frequently today, but sociologists have been slow to include immigrant collective action in the canon of social movement or immigration scholarship. Is this because, until recently, immigrant protest was minimal or limited in scope? The authors take a macro-comparative approach, recoding the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset to compare proimmigrant collective action with paradigmatic, well-studied movements from 1960 to 1995. The authors find that immigrant collective action was on par with iconic movements, mobilized similar numbers of people, occurred across the United States, engaged in disruptive action, and encompassed a wide range of origins, thus correcting possible misperceptions that immigrants did not engage in contentious action before the 1990s. The authors conclude by advocating for a population at risk focus for studying the emergence of collective action, decentering the borders of collective mobilization, and illuminating the vulnerabilities of legal status. University of British Columbia Publication 2024-01-01
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