Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper takes the class of economic immigrants to Canada, as enacted by Romanian citizens that apply the Canadian active immigration policy, to investigate a case of personal, institutional, and social-remaking of the self, in a context where negotiating the boundary between certainty and uncertainty itself is crucial to the process.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper takes the class of economic immigrants to Canada, as enacted by Romanian citizens that apply the Canadian active immigration policy, to investigate a case of personal, institutional, and social-remaking of the self, in a context where negotiating the boundary between certainty and uncertainty itself is crucial to the process. Based on ethnographic material that includes immigration narratives, participant observation, and published autobiographical work, the paper will engage the tensions between categories of the person, as set by law and enacted through various social and institutional practices, and as imagined, subverted, played, and effected by immigrants to whom these categories are assigned. The analysis brings insights into how different legal or normative statuses embodied by the same person, such as dual citizenship, transnational activity, wife and worker, or practicing two different professions raise questions about their legitimacy, meanings, and stability, and document and illuminate critical aspects of the workings of actors and institutions such as the state, the family, or the workplace.