From intersectional position to migrant standpoint: Ghanaian migrants' knowledges of wellbeing, care, and constraint in Alberta, Canada.

Abstract

Introduction: Intersectionality has strengthened migration scholarship by showing how race, gender, class, legal status, culture, and other relations of power shape migrant lives. However, it has been less explicit about how migration-shaped locations become sites of interpretation, critique, and knowledge production. This article addresses that gap by developing the concept of migrant standpoint through the case of mental health promotion among Ghanaians in Alberta, Canada.

Methods: The study used a qualitative design grounded in Ori-Oyena, an African-grounded methodological orientation centered on relational knowledge, story, participation, and communal interpretation. Data were generated through in-depth interviews with Ghanaian adults in Alberta and a community dialogue with leaders that refined emergent interpretations. Analysis proceeded iteratively, combining qualitative coding with interpretive attention to how participants defined wellbeing, explained constraint, and described the conditions under which support became possible or difficult to sustain. Participants varied by gender, migration pathway, occupational location, religious affiliation, and length of residence, and the analysis treats that variation as constitutive of standpoint rather than as background noise.

Results: Participants understood wellbeing in relational rather than narrowly individual terms, linking it to spiritual grounding, family relationships, moral responsibility, and social legitimacy. Four interrelated dimensions of migrant standpoint emerged: relational wellbeing; translated survival knowledge; institutional misrecognition and selective engagement; and double vision as comparative social knowledge. Together, these findings showed that migration shaped not only exposure to inequality but also the interpretation of care, distress, and institutional fit. These dimensions were internally differentiated: religious practice supplied a rival system for authoritatively naming distress, and the relational labour on which wellbeing depended was gendered, falling disproportionately on women whose kin networks had not migrated with them.

Discussion: Migrant standpoint extends intersectional migration scholarship by shifting attention from social position alone to socially situated knowledge shaped by movement, settlement, racialization, and institutional negotiation. Mental health promotion proved to be a revealing analytic site because it exposed broader struggles over recognition, belonging, legitimacy, and the conditions under which wellbeing can be sustained. Rather than proposing a universal migrant standpoint, this article shows how a bounded empirical case can clarify a broader sociological mechanism through which migrant communities generate knowledge under altered structural conditions.