Pride and Prejudice
An Intersectional Look at Graduate Employability of Transgender and Queer International Students
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32674/jcihe.v12i6S1.3059Keywords:
queer, graduate employability, comparative analysisAbstract
The concept of ’graduate employability’ has commanded an ever-more prominent position in higher education (HE) (Blackmore et al., 2015; Nguyen et al., 2019; Tomlinson, 2017; Tran et al., 2019). However, there is scant attention to sexual orientation discrimination in employability among transgender and queer international students; that is, the behaviors and practices—both deliberate and nonconscious—that disadvantage individuals of a particular sexual orientation over individuals of another sexual orientation in employment contexts (Ghavami et al., 2016; Herek, 2015). This qualitative study is aimed at addressing this lacuna by directly examining discrimination in employability against transgender and queer communities. A focus group interview will be adopted to recruit seven participants by the snowball sampling approach (Creswell & Poth, 2016). The participants will be international graduates and active full-time or part-time job students with transgender and queer identity in Canada and Australia. The semi-structured interview method allows follow-up questions during the interviews, including back and forth conversations (Salmons, 2012). A list of ten open-ended questions is employed for the focus group meeting. Our research looks through a comparative perspective between Australia and Canada contexts, which provides a more insightful and intriguing discussion on intersectional and transnational experiences of gender and sexual discrimination against queer international students and graduates at the workplaces. We will investigate the social, cultural, and political peculiarities of discrimination affecting the employability towards this group of employees at the Canadian and Australian workplaces. We will apply the thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006). With the use of Nvivo 10 software, we analyze the interview data. We expect the findings to offer an in-depth understanding of the challenges the LGBT group have experienced and implications for the workplace policy. The findings could be around the social, cultural, and political impacts of Canadian and Australian working and recruitment environments on the extent of discrimination that affects the likelihood of the participants’ employability.
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Tran, L. T., Stafford, G., Vu, T. T. P., Rahimi, M., Bui, E. I. H. T., Nguyen, H. T., & Cole, D. (2019). Engagement with Asia via the New Colombo Plan: Impact on Australian students’ career directions and employability. Innovate higher education to enhance graduate employability: Rethinking the possibilities, 95-108.
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