SA 345: Race, Immigration and the Canadian State

For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies by email moninder_lalli@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.

Essay

Start Your Research Here - This page gives you an overview of the research process and steps to take to find resources for your essay.

Selected encyclopedias and handbooks

Get overviews, summaries, key authors, debates and ideas from encyclopedias, handbooks or textbooks. 

For more, try Background information

Find journal articles

Start with the "Proquest Sociology Collection" database and then move on to other databases. Limit your search to "academic", "scholarly" or "peer-reviewed." For articles not available in fulltext within the database, use the "Get@SFU" link to find it or to initiate an inter-library loan request.

For Canadian topics, also try

  • CBCA Complete  Canadian scholarly journal articles, trade publications, dissertations, books, newspapers and and magazines.
  • Canada Commons (formerly, Canadian Electronic Library from desLibris) - contains the full text of public policy documents from Canadian institutes, think-tanks and research groups.
    • The "Boolean operators" (AND, OR) must be in capital letters.
    • If you don't want variations of a term then put the term in quotation marks ("term")
    • Advanced search engine:
  • Canadian Newsstream  covers the major Canadian daily newspapers.
  • Canadian Research Index Includes all depository publications of research value issued by both the federal government and the ten provinces and three territories; hard to find non-depository publications issued by hundreds of Canadian government agencies and departments

Find books in the Library

Library Catalogue search guide

Search the SFU Library Catalogue, using either the Basic or the Advanced search

You can further limit the search results (below) by "subject" or "resource type"

Sample research question:

"What is the effect of the Anti-terrorism Act and how is it used for national security"

(anti-terror* OR national security OR border security) AND (law OR legislat* OR regulat*) AND (race OR racial OR islam*) AND Canad*

Keywords for additional topics:

Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words

Use pulldown menu and select, "Source Types" as "Books"

Note:  For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")

Use the  "subject  headings" within the library record for a relevant book to find more books on that topic.

Selected books

Browse by subject

Catalogue Search / Browse

  Change "Title" to "Subject" and enter:

Government information

Immigration and refugees

Statistics

Citing Government documents, Canadian -- APA style | MLA style | Chicago style

  • Statista  A statistics portal that integrates statistics from thousands of sources and provides simple exports of both data and charts in multiple formats.  Look for the "source" for each table or graph.

International

Doing interviews

For more books, browse the following subjects:

Library guides

Presentation skills

Writing help

Student Learning Commons provides assistance and numerous, helpful guides.