PHYSICAL ACTIVITY EXPERIENCES OF PERSIAN WOMEN RECENTLY IMMIGRATED TO CANADA

New immigrants to Canada are generally in similar or better physical and mental health than people born in Canada, however, many studies suggest that their health tends to decline quickly after immigration. Lower physical activity levels among new immigrants might be contributing to this phenomenon. There is a paucity of information regarding the physical activity behaviour of the Canadian immigrant population in general and of West Asian women, such as Iranians (Persians), in particular. Given that this group is characterised by an increasing population growth and lower rates of physical activity, it is critical to understand how best to address physical activity promotion in this population. Purpose: To understand the physical activity experiences of Persian women recently immigrated to Toronto, Canada in order to develop recommendations for the design and implementation of tailored physical activity programs. Methods: A qualitative interpretive description approach was chosen to collect and describe ideas, experiences, and perceptions of physical activity within 10 new immigrant women. Using an inductive approach, two fundamental techniques of immersion and crystallization were used throughout the analysis. Thematic analysis was conducted by performing a sequential process of open and axial coding. Emerged themes were further conceptualized through a socio-ecological lens. Results: The facilitators and barriers to physical activity among the women were situated within five overarching categories, 1) Perceptions about physical activity, 2) New physical environment and social structure, 3) Cultural heritage values, 4) Settlement and immigration factors, and 5) Physical activity program features. Discussion: Findings revealed that Persian new immigrant women’s engagement in physical activity after immigration is influenced by factors across the individual, sociocultural, environmental, institutional, and policy levels. Newcomer women’s physical activity was influenced by their transition from their society of origin to the host society and the challenges and successes experienced throughout the settlement and acculturation process. The most noticeable barrier to physical activity in Canada for the women emerged as the lack of communication of physical activity information to newcomers. A set of recommendations is provided for developing efficient physical activity programs for Persian immigrant women, which may also be relevant for other immigrant groups in Canada.

TENDENCIA THATCHERITIS OR ENGLISHNESS REMADE: The Fictions of Julian Barnes, Hanif Kureishi and Pat Barker

Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, and Hanif Kureishi are all canonical authors whose fictions are widely believed to reflect the cultural and political state of a nation that is post-war, post-imperial and post-modern. While much has been written on how Barker’s and Kureishi’s early works in particular respond to and intervene in the presiding political narrative of the 1980s – Thatcherism – treatment of how revenants of Thatcherism have shaped these writers’ works from 1990 on has remained cursory. Thatcherism is more than an obvious historical reference point for Barker, Barnes, and Kureishi; their works demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of how Thatcher’s reworkings of the repertoires of Englishness – a representational as well as political and cultural endeavour – persist beyond her time in office. Barnes, Barker, and Kureishi seem to have reached the same conclusion as political and cultural critics: Thatcher and Thatcherism have remade not only the contemporary political and cultural landscapes but also the electorate and consequently the English themselves. Tony Blair’s conception of the New Britain proved less than satisfactory because contemporary repertoires of Englishness repeat and rework historical and not incidentally imperial formulations of England and Englishness rather than envision civic and populist formulations of renewal. Barnes’s England, England and Arthur & George confront the discourse of inevitability that has come to be attached to contemporary formulations of both political and cultural Englishness – both in terms of its predictable demise and its belated celebration. Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and “The Body” speak to an alteration that has taken place in which historical Englishness and Thatcherism have become complementary rather than contrasting discourses. What Barker’s Border Crossing and Double Vision offer against this backdrop is a subtle interrogation of how renewal itself comes to be a presiding mode of cultural reflection that absorbs revolutionary possibility.