What It Takes to Feel Canadian: Multiculturalism and the Logic of Home.

This paper is based on a conversation I had with D.Š., a 42-year-old woman who emigrated to Nova Scotia in 2014 from Bosnia and Herzegovina with her husband and young son. We met in December 2022 to talk about the idea of 'home' when it comes to being an immigrant and a firstgeneration Canadian. As a first-generation Canadian who emigrated to Canada from the former Yugoslavia in 1992 and someone who has been personally interested in diasporic identities in the Canadian context, I found D.Š.'s perspective meaningful and illustrative of many issues relating to challenges and potentials in Canada's official status as a multicultural nation. D.Š.'s narrative identifies, restructures, and deconstructs in multiple ways a key social boundary, 'foreignness,' which is embedded in the practice of homemaking and the process of integration understood as relational. My analysis of D.Š.'s narrative is conceptualized in terms of the identity work that is required of all Canadians for Canada to live up to its official status as a multicultural country. In the analysis, I draw upon the philosophy of encounter, the concept of 'homemaking' and recent studies on relational integration. The paper engages empirically the meaning of relational integration in the context of everyday 'homemaking.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]