Underground Patchworks of Access: Migrant Health Activism in Ontario and the Emotional Work of Storytelling and Deservingness

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Ontario migrant health activists use de/bordering strategies to negotiate healthcare access for individuals with precarious status. It focuses on the emotional work involved in this advocacy, exploring how activists navigate shifting institutional and interpersonal contexts, manage emotional challenges, and adapt their de/bordering efforts accordingly. Using discourse analysis, I draw on 47 in-depth interviews and institutional and governmental health documents. Engaging interdisciplinary literatures in bordering studies, social movement theory, and affect scholarship, I analyze how storytelling, emotions, and context shape migrant health advocacy. Activists’ stories, shaped by evolving contexts and emotional responses, inform their de/bordering strategies. Their emotional work is sustained through coalition-building and solidarity, which help them cope with distress and build relationships that in turn shape their advocacy. I argue that by telling stories rooted in emotional experiences and shifting contexts, activists iteratively construct non-binary understandings of deservingness and challenge dominant discourses and power structures. Their de/bordering strategies evolve across socio-political and emotional contexts, drawing on storytelling, informal knowledge-sharing, and coalition-building as both advocacy and support. This dissertation contributes to bordering scholarship by offering empirical and theoretical insights into how de/bordering strategies are enacted in migrant health advocacy and how emotional and contextual shifts shape activists’ work. I examine how activists negotiate healthcare access while navigating exclusionary immigration and health regimes. In doing so, I bring de/bordering as a concept into conversation with broader dynamics of differential inclusion and expand the literature by developing a framework attuned to the complexity of deservingness assessments in this field.