The social construction of statelessness in Canada: a study of national media 1939-2011

To explore notions of knowledge production and narratives of truth surrounding statelessness in Canada, this study employs a mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology to a media analysis of 616 newspaper articles from Canada's two largest national newspaper, the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. Within a social constructivist analytical framework, it finds that using citizenship as a tool to divide 'us' from 'them', statelessness is constructed in such a way that reinforces power relations between those who belong in Canada and those who do not. This divide is achieved via the construction of the stateless person as the 'other' in Canadian society, the ill-recognition of statelessness as a phenomenon in and of itself, and thirdly, the construction of statelessness contributes to a blurring of the definitional clarity of statelessness, further complicating our understanding of statelessness as a separate and distinct form of status in the Canadian context.