CRS Seminar: From Displacement to Belonging: Advancing mental health equity for refugee students
September 29, 2026
1:00pm - 2:30pm (ET/Toronto)
This is a virtual event
Zoom: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/9T6gHAyATrCIxVGGjbaoWQ
Guest speaker: Sevgi Arslan, Visiting Scholar at York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies and the Founder and President of the Hêvî Kurdish Centre for Mental Health and Community Care
School-based mental-health policy occupies a critical intersection of forced migration, racialization, education, and institutional care. Although Canadian education systems increasingly invoke equity, cultural responsiveness, and identity affirmation, refugee students are frequently absorbed into administrative categories such as “newcomer,” “multilingual,” “racialized,” “equity-deserving,” or simply “all students.” These categories can make refugee students institutionally visible while simultaneously obscuring the political and historical conditions shaping their well-being, including forced displacement, interrupted education, family separation, legal precarity, contested belonging, and previous encounters with state authority. Within this policy landscape, Western professional and clinical knowledge often retains the authority to define distress, risk, appropriate intervention, and successful outcomes, while refugee families are positioned primarily as service users, consultees, or populations requiring improved mental-health literacy. Drawing on anti-colonial theory, this seminar critically examines the Toronto District School Board’s Mental Health and Addictions Strategy 2023–2026 and related policy documents. It considers how the policy constructs refugee need, organizes institutional responsibility, authorizes particular forms of knowledge, and determines whose participation can influence decisions about care. The analysis finds that culturally responsive programmes, multilingual resources, community partnerships, and caregiver engagement represent meaningful advances, yet recognition and consultation do not necessarily redistribute authority, resources, or accountability. The seminar also introduces the study’s forthcoming interview phase with Kurdish refugee parents and guardians, whose perspectives will illuminate how school-based mental-health systems are interpreted, navigated, and potentially contested. By centering caregivers as knowledge holders, the research asks what would be required for school mental-health policy to move beyond formal inclusion toward accountable access, shared authority, and culturally meaningful care.
Dr. Sevgi Arslan is a researcher, social worker, educator, and mental health practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of race, education, migration, and care. She is a Visiting Scholar at York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies and the Founder and President of the Hêvî Kurdish Centre for Mental Health and Community Care. Her research broadly examines race and education, with particular attention to how institutional policies and everyday practices shape the educational experiences, well-being, and broader life outcomes of racialized students, including racialized refugee students. Drawing on her experience in social work, anti-racism education, and community-based research, Dr. Arslan brings critical race and decolonial perspectives into conversation with lived experience and frontline practice. At the heart of her work is an urgent question: how can educational institutions move beyond formal commitments to equity and create environments in which racialized students feel seen, supported, and able to thrive?
