Speakers

Yasmeen Abu-Laban is Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Politics of Citizenship and Human Rights at the University of Alberta. She is also a Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Her published research addresses themes related to nationalism, globalization and processes of racialization, immigration policies and politics, surveillance and border control and multiculturalism and anti-racism. Her most recent book, co-authored with Ethel Tungohan and Christina Gabriel, is Containing Diversity: Canada and the Politics of Immigration in the 21st Century (University of Toronto Press, 2023).

Girmachew Adugna works at the Center for Forced Displacement and Migration Studies, Addis Ababa University, and he received his PhD in human geography from the University of Adelaide. His thesis examined the impact of migration and remittances on home communities in Ethiopia. Girmachew was a Research Fellow at the Hugo Centre for Population and Migration Research at the University of Adelaide. He has published in international peer-reviewed journals on migration, remittances, diaspora engagement and transnational family ties. Girmachew has worked for several national and international organizations and has been engaged in research and consultation on internal and international migration issues in Ethiopia and across the Horn of Africa.

Amanda Bisong is Policy Officer in the Migration and Mobility Team of The Centre for Africa-Europe Relations in Maastricht, The Netherlands. She has a background in law and master’s degrees in international law and economics (World Trade Institute) and international trade policy and trade law (Lund University). She is currently pursuing a PhD on migration governance in West Africa at the Faculty of Law in Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on migration agreements, labour migration, migration governance, the linkages between trade and migration in Africa and the interplay between regional and national commitments. In recent years, she has published several research articles on migration governance.

Alberto Bougleux is a Documentary Filmmaker based in Barcelona and with experience working in over 20 countries around the world. He specializes in life stories and using new formats of social documentary and digital storytelling as innovative methodologies and dissemination tools. His work has evolved around issues of environmental justice, migration and transnational mobility (living between countries) and the (trans)formation of cities through migration. 

John Carlaw is Research Fellow, CERC Migration, at the Toronto Metropolitan University. He holds a PhD in political science and a diploma in Latin American and Caribbean studies from York University. His work examines the politics of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, including his current projects: CONTESTATIONS of Migration and Belonging in Canada amidst COVID-19 and Neoconservative Multiculturalism: The Conservative Party of Canada and the Politics of Citizenship, Migration and Multiculturalism in Settler Colonial Canada (manuscript form). John organized and leads CERC Migration’s graduate student mentorship program and has taught at York University and Trent University. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Project Lead of York University’s Syria Response and Refugee Initiative, a refugee-sponsorship and -education initiative at York’s Centre for Refugee Studies. His work appears in Canadian diversity = Diversite Canadienne, the CERC/TMCIS Working Paper Series, The Conversation, the Journal of Canadian Studies, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and Studies in Political Economy.

Mattias Ekman is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Stockholm University. Mattias’s research interests include online political mobilization, political communication, online racism and far-right online media and communication strategies. He is the director of the research project Interactive Racism in Swedish Online Media, Press and Politics: Discourses on Immigration and Refugees at Times of Crisis and is a co-researcher in the project Immigration and the Normalization of Racism: Discursive Shifts in Swedish Politics and Media 2010-22, both funded by the Swedish Research Council. For more than a decade, Mattias has published widely on the relationships between digital media, the far and populist right and racism and xenophobia. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism at Uppsala University and chairs the political communication division of NordMedia.

Eric Fong is Chair Professor in Sociology and Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. He joined the university in 2020 after serving as Chair of the Department of Sociology and the inaugural Director of the Research Centre on Migration and Mobility at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prior to moving to Hong Kong in 2016, Eric was Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto for more than 20 years. He currently serves as President of the Hong Kong Sociological Association. He formerly served as President of the Canadian Population Society and the North American Chinese Sociologists Association. He publishes widely on race and ethnic residential patterns and immigration. His latest book, co-authored with Kumiko Shibuya and Brent Berry, is Segregation (Polity Press, 2022).

Anatoliy Gruzd is Professor and Director of Research at the Social Media Lab of Toronto Metropolitan University. Situated at the intersections of social-media research, information management and communication, Anatoliy’s multidisciplinary program focuses on how social-media data can be used to tackle a wide variety of societal problems, from helping educators and students navigate social media for teaching and learning to studying the nature and scale of online misinformation and disinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Anatoliy is currently serving his second term as a Canada Research Chair examining the application of new privacy-preserving technologies like blockchains and differential privacy, particularly in academic research settings.

Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho is Professor in the Department of Geography and Senior Research Fellow in the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. Her research addresses how citizenship is changing as a result of multidirectional migration flows in Asia-Pacific. Her fieldwork sites include Singapore, China and Myanmar. In Singapore, through various research projects, she has studied how Singaporeans and migrants mutually negotiate social differences. She wrote Citizens in Motion: Emigration, Immigration and Re-migration Across China’s Borders (Stanford University Press, 2018), which received the American Sociological Association’s 2019 award for Best Book in Global and Transnational Sociology by an International Scholar. Elaine edits the journal Social and Cultural Geography and serves on the editorial boards of journals exploring geography, citizenship studies and migration.

Orit Kamir is Professor of Law, Gender and Culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Much of her academic research explores the complex interrelations of law, gender and film, including the monographs Every Breath You Take: Stalking Stories and the Law (University of Michigan Press, 2001) and Framed: Women in Law and Film (Duke University Press, 2006). A big part of her scholarship explores the intricate histories of honour and dignity in societies, cultures and legal systems (see Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, and Radicalization [Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2020]). Orit is Co-founder and Academic Head of The Israeli Center for Human Dignity. She has drafted legislation, including Israel’s 1998 law to prevent sexual harassment and is a social and feminist activist in Israel. She currently promotes legislation and conducts workplace training to alleviate workplace bullying.

Bernadette Klausberger is a Media Producer, Art Festival Manager and Lecturer. She has produced a range of award-winning audiovisual projects, from documentaries to experimental fiction and auteur projects, among them the German-Lebanese co-production Manivelle: Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow (2017). Bernadette has a special focus on projects at the intersections of art, education and politics. For the last 10 years, she has co-created and produced Massive Open Online Courses, among them The Future of Storytelling, ranked as one of the most successful courses the organization has ever produced. For Migration Matters and together with international migration scholars, she has developed an extensive series of educational videos on topics like nationalism, populism, multiculturalism and belonging. The latest project, Migrant Lives in Pandemic Times, is a film series and digital storytelling platform initiated by CERC Migration; it documents the insights of migrants from around the world and combines them with academic analysis.

Andrei Korobkov is Professor of Political Science and International Relations and Russian Studies Minor Director at Middle Tennessee State University. Andrei graduated from Moscow State University and holds a PhD in economics from the Institute of International Economic and Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a PhD in political science from the University of Alabama. His academic interests include issues of post-communist transition, international migration, geopolitics, state- and nation-building, ethnic conflict and the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. He has previously served as U.S. Co-chair of the working group on migration at the U.S.-Russia Social Expertise Exchange and as President of the Post-Communist States in International Relations section of the International Studies Association, where he currently serves as the Section Vice President and Program Chair.

Mehdi Lahlou is Professor of Economics. He taught at the National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics in Rabat, Morocco, and was an associate researcher at Mohammed V University in Rabat. He is a contributing researcher to the Horizon 2022 project GREASE, Religious Diversity Governance in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the European Horizon 2020 project Co-radicalisation of Youth in Europe: Islamophobism vs. Islamism. He coordinates the Mediterranean City-to-City Migration project, supported by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, and the Returning to New Opportunities program, supported by the Institute for International Cooperation of the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband e.V. and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit. Recent collaborations have been undertaken with Keele University  - UK (within a North African project, called MADAR) and with colleagues at the European University Institute, University of Montreal, the University of Paris, Institute of Political Studies, and the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. He is a member of the Knowledge Platform for Migration Governance in Africa. In 1982, he earned his PhD in economics from Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. 

Loren B. Landau is Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford and Research Professor with the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of the Witwatersrand. Together with Jean Pierre Misago, he is Co-founder and Co-director of the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab. He previously held visiting and faculty positions at Princeton University, Georgetown University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His interdisciplinary scholarship explores mobility, multi-scale governance and the transformation of socio-political community across the Global South. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Loren’s publications include I Want to Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in South Africa’s Great Metropolis (Wits Press, 2018); Forging African Communities: Mobility, Integration, and Belonging (Palgrave, 2017); Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa (UN University Press/Wits Press, 2012); Contemporary Migration to South Africa (World Bank, 2011); and The Humanitarian Hangover: Displacement, Aid, and Transformation in Western Tanzania (Wits Press, 2008).

Jérémie Molho is Senior Research Associate, CERC Migration, at Toronto Metropolitan University.  He was previously the Marie Curie Fellow at the National University of Singapore (2019-2021) and at the European University Institute (2021-2022). He has a PhD in geography from the University of Angers. His research interests include the effects of cultural globalization on cities, urban cultural policies and the governance of diversity. Since 2017, his research has focused on the governance of diversity in Doha and Singapore.

Stein Monteiro is Senior Research Associate, CERC Migration, at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research focuses on the economics of immigration and the socio-structural characteristics of immigrant-labour market integration, including the roles of family dynamics, internet usage, social networks, statistical discrimination and information asymmetries among employers. Stein has a PhD in economics from York University and has published in the Journal of Applied Economics, the Review of Economic Analysis, the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies and SN Social Sciences. 

Melissa Mouthaan is Policy Analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. She is a Sociologist interested in the politics of policy-making in migration and education, and she holds a PhD in development studies from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research focused on the European Union’s migration-related cooperation with West African countries. Previously, she worked in research at a not-for-profit organization at the University of Cambridge and for the European Commission’s in-house research centre.

Oreva Olakpe researches how communities without status (e.g., irregular migrants and cross-border minorities) in the Global South form institutional structures and make space for themselves in their society of settlement. Oreva has studied sub-Saharan African migrant businessmen with mostly expired status, African asylum seekers in China and a cross-border minority at the Cameroon-Nigeria border. She has also recently worked on EU-funded projects on migrant integration, migration partnerships and approaches to forced displacement in West Africa. She has carried out research on African migrations and informal communal structures, funded by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. She received a PhD in law from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Zeynep Şahin Mencütek is Senior Researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies, where she leads a comparative project on return and reintegration. She is also Research Affiliate with CERC Migration at the Toronto Metropolitan University, where she conducts joint research on the transnational governance of migration. She held the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (June 2020-May 2021) and an international fellowship at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg (2019-2020). She also served as Senior Researcher for the Horizon 2020 project RESPOND: Multilevel Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond. Previously, she served as an assistant professor in Turkey, and in 2018, she achieved the rank of docent in the field of international relations. Her research examines the governance of migration, return migration, diaspora politics and Middle Eastern politics. Along with her monograph, Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East (Routledge, 2018), she has published dozens of articles in internationally refereed journals, chapters in international collected volumes, encyclopaedia entries, book reviews and policy reports. In 2011, she received her PhD in politics and international relations from the University of Southern California.

Mary Boatemaa Setrana is Director of the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of Ghana, where she leads large research projects funded by the European Union, the International Organization for Migration, the International Labour Organization, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Worldwide Universities Network and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. She led the finalization of Botswana’s national migration policy and consulted on the development of national migration policies in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe as well as the labour migration policy in Malawi. Mary served as a technical advisor to the African Union Commission’s work on migration governance. She is currently an advisory board member of the African Research Universities Alliance’s Centre of Excellence on Migration and Mobility. Her research interests include forced migration and displacement, migration governance and gender, youth migration and aspirations and transnational migration and diasporas.

Bindi Shah is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Southampton. Her research interests address migration, religion, nationhood, citizenship and belonging with respect to Asian Americans and British South Asians, the Jain diaspora and wider migration flows to the U.K. She is also interested in the role social capital plays in fostering environmental/climate sustainability and justice among marginalized groups. She is author of Laotian Daughters: Working toward Community, Belonging and Environmental Justice (Temple University Press, 2012), which received the 2014 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Outstanding Book in the Social Sciences. Currently, she leads the Ramniklal Solanki Pioneers Project, which aims to create a digital archive documenting the lives of British South Asians who have made a significant contribution to the making of modern Britain. She is also involved in a public engagement, intergenerational project to understand British South Asians’ peceptions of BBC South Asian programming from the 1960s onward.

Richa Shivakoti is Research Lead, Migration Governance, CERC Migration, at Toronto Metropolitan University. Previously, she worked at Carleton University, Maastricht University, the International Organization for Migration and the International Labour Organization. Her research focus is on the governance of labour migration within Asia, particularly in the labour-sending states of South Asia and Southeast Asia. She is interested in the different facets of the migration-development nexus, including remittance, gender, diaspora, migration governance and international labour migration. Her recent publications have appeared in International Migration, Administrative Theory & Praxis, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Comparative Migration Studies, and the Journal of Asian Public Policy.

Shannon Speed is a tribal citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC) and Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Shannon has worked for the last two decades in Mexico and in the United States on issues of Indigenous autonomy, sovereignty, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, social justice and activist research. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Spanish, and has published seven books and edited volumes, including her most recent, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State, which won the Best Subsequent Book Award of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2019 and a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award in 2020. She has a new co-edited volume entitled, Heightened States of Injustice: Activist Research on Indigenous Women and Violence (University of Arizona Press). Shannon currently serves as the Past President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). In recent years, she was awarded the Chickasaw Dynamic Woman of the Year Award by the Chickasaw Nation, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the State Bar of Texas Indian Law Section.

Paul Spoonley is Distinguished Professor and is retired from Massey University, where he was Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2022, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern appointed him Co-director of He Whenua Taurikura: The National Centre on Countering Violent Extremism. He is an advisor to the New Zealand Police Commissioner on a project on systemic racism in policing. He has written or edited 29 books; the most recent are The New New Zealand: Facing Demographic Disruption (Massey University Press, 2021) and Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Otago University Press, 2022). He was a Program Leader of research on the impacts of immigration and diversity on Aotearoa (2014-2021). Paul was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2011; he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010; and he is a Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. He is also Co-chair of Metropolis International.

Cyrus Sundar Singh is an AcademiCreActivist and Gemini Award-winning Filmmaker, Scholar, Songwriter, Composer, Poet and Change Maker who pushes conventional boundaries to produce research, films and music in a myriad of venues and formats, including broadcasts, festivals and conferences. He is a much sought-after creative Scholar and Guest Lecturer, and he undertakes research and production projects in settings around the world, including India, Israel, Spain, Haiti, Jamaica and Sri Lanka. Most recently, Cyrus directed the i am… storytelling project, which included 28 short films by graduate students from across Canada exploring identity and belonging. In 2022, he repeated this success with Under the Tent, which is comprised of 18 creative projects unpacking Canadian multiculturalism. His recent essays are published in peer-reviewed collections, including “Floating to the Lure of the Promised Land” in Finding Refuge in Canada: Narratives of Dislocation (Athabasca University Press, 2021) and “How We See: The Colourization of Race in Gnosis” in the Journal of Philosophy (2020). Cyrus’s photo and video installation Emancipation2Africville formed part of Africville: A Spirit that Lives On, a 2019 reflection project at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery and footage at the WC2 Network’s 2018 symposium in Toronto.

Anna Triandafyllidou holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration, at Toronto Metropolitan University. Previously, she was based at the European University Institute, where she held the Robert Schuman Chair on Global Pluralism. She edits the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, and she is Chair of the IMISCOE Editorial Committee and a member of its board of directors. A Sociologist by training, her research focuses on migration and asylum governance as well as national identity and cultural and religious diversity in comparative perspective. In 2021, the University of Liège awarded Anna with a doctorate honoris causa in recognition of her contribution to migration scholarship. Her recently authored books include What is Europe? with Ruby Gropas (2nd ed., Routledge, 2022) and Rethinking Migration and Return in Southeastern Europe with Eda Gemi (Routledge, 2021). Her articles have recently appeared in the Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Society, Ethnicities, Comparative Migration Studies, International Migration and Nations and Nationalism.