Tanya Aberman
Coordinator, Sanctuary Scholars Programs
Tanya Aberman (she/her) holds a PhD in Gender Feminist and Women’s Studies from York University. Her research has focused on migration issues from intersectional feminist, critical migration and border studies perspectives. She also specializes in the area of access to education, having developed, coordinated and taught community and university-based education programs for newcomer and migrant students. Tanya is the coordinator of the Sanctuary Scholars programs at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University, programs that provide access to the universities for students who have precarious immigration status. She is also one of the founders of the Sanctuary Students Solidarity and Support (S4) Collective, a member-led organization that strives to support migrant students with accessing and succeeding in secondary and post-secondary education and works with institutions to increase equitable access for these students.
Email: abermant@yorku.ca
Farah Ahmad
Associate Professor, School of Health Policy and Management, Faculty of Health
Dr. Farah Ahmad is Associate Professor at the School of Health Policy and Management, Faculty of Health, York University. Dr. Ahmad’s training includes family medicine, public health sciences, and health care research with critical approaches. She conducts community engaged mixed-method research to examine and address health inequities at the intersection of immigration/refugee status, gender and race specially for the socially stigmatized issues like mental health conditions, family violence, and neurodiversity. Her collaborators include local and international organizations engaged in research, practice and policymaking for health and social care. Dr. Ahmad has received over 12 million in research grants and published +100 articles, chapters and reports. She enjoys mentoring students and has supervised 30 graduate students for their research projects as part of thesis, major research paper or required practicums. In recognition of her mentorship, she received Kiran van Rijn Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Strategic Training Initiative in Health Research (STIHR) in Health Care, Technology and Place. Dr. Ahmad is recipient of prestigious awards like the CIHR Health Research Fellowships (2003–4 and 2004–7), the CIHR Postdoctoral Award (2007–9), the CIHR–STIHR Doctoral/Postdoctoral Award (top-up), and the CIHR Investigator Award (2014–19), the Early Researcher Award (2014–19) established by the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation (Ontario) to train emerging researchers, and the recognition of York University Research Leaders (2015).
Email: farahmad@yorku.ca
Othon Alexandrakis
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Research interests: Child Migration (unaccompanied minors; survival strategies; theory of human movement), Humanitarianism (humanitarian populism; social solidarity; mediating humanitarianisms), Human Resilience (agency; collectivization; as pre-political condition)
Email: oalexand@yorku.ca
Muna-Udbi Abdulkadir Ali
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environment and Urban Change (EUC)
Dr. Muna-Udbi Abdulkadir Ali (she/her/they/them) joined the Faculty of Environment and Urban Change (EUC) as an Assistant Professor in 2021. Before joining EUC, she worked as an Assistant Professor at California State University San Marcos, and as a Visiting Faculty in Sociology at Christopher Newport University. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, her primary research interests include diverse fields such as Black studies, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, Black feminist studies, criminology, transnational feminism, queer studies, environmental justice, media studies, public pedagogy, and public policy (specifically immigration, refugee, health and welfare policies). Ali’s research explores issues of gender, race, class, criminality, surveillance, and citizenship, as it manifests for Black refugee communities. Her work has appeared as book chapters from Peter Lang and Life Rattle Press. She has also published articles in Darkmatter and Reconsidering Development. Outside of academia, Ali is a community worker, curriculum and policy consultant, researcher, and anti-oppression educator. She has worked in education and curriculum development in Canada, United States, Kenya, and Somalia.
Email: muali@yorku.ca
Saptarishi Bandopadhyay
Assistant Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Research interests: Intellectual Property Law; Disaster Governance; Humanitarian Law; International Environmental Law and Politics; Legal and Environmental History; Science and Technology Studies; International Law; Art and Law; and Law and the Humanities.
Ranu Basu
Associate Professor, Geography
Research interests: Geographies of marginality, diversity and social justice in cities; power, space and activism; anti-imperialism and post-colonial geographies; forced migration and the geopolitics of subaltern cosmopolitanism; critical geographies of education; and spatial methodologies including critical GIS.
Email: ranubasu@yorku.ca
Amar Bhatia
Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Research interests: property law, refugee law, globalization & the law (focused on migrant work)
Email: abhatia@osgoode.yorku.ca
Nergis Canefe
Professor, Department of Politics, Graduate Programs in Social and Political Thought, Socio-Legal Studies and Osgoode Hall
Research interests: International Criminal Law, Critical Human Rights, Intergenerational Trauma, Memories of atrocities and injustice, Collective Responsibility, International Politics of Dispossession, Genocide and crimes against humanity, Nationalism and minority rights in the Balkans and the Middle East, Legal Ethics in international law pertaining to mass political violence.
Email: nergiscanefe@gmail.com
Alison Crosby
Associate Professor, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies
Research interests: Gender Issues, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Transitional Justice, Memory and Memorialization.
Email: acrosby@yorku.ca
Mehraneh Ebrahimi
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Research interests: Iranian diaspora literature and art, refugee literature. Prof. Ebrahimi’s area of specialization encompasses Middle Eastern diasporic writing, in particular, the literary aftermath of the war on terror.
Email: mehr@yorku.ca
Luin Goldring
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Research interests: Immigration, Sociology, Citizenship and non-citizenship, Precarious work, Transnational migration
Email: goldring@yorku.ca
Luann Good Gingrich
Associate Professor, Department of Social Work
Research interests: Analysis of Social Dynamics Defined by Migration, Gender, Religion, Ethnicity, Race, and Wealth on the Nature and Dimensions of Social Inclusion. Formal and Informal Processes of Social Division and Social Support in Transnational, even supra-national, Social Environments. The Paradoxes of Voluntary Social Exclusion, “choice”, and Social Inclusion in contexts of Migratory Livelihoods. “Women’s work” in Globalized, Polarized, De-socialized, Racialised and Feminized Labour Markets. Emerging Forms of Diaspora, Particularly for Dietsche Mennonites from Mexico. The Intersections between ideas, Material Realities and Subjective Experience of Policy Systems and Social Programs.
Email: luanngg@yorku.ca
Roya Haghiri-Vijeh
Assistant Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health
Roya Haghiri-Vijeh (She/Her/Hers) is an educator and researcher in the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, on the treaty lands and the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. As a first-generation settler and an uninvited guest on this land, Roya is grateful for the opportunity to live and work here. Her scholarship, underpinned by Gadamerian Hermeneutics, interpretive phenomenology, and mixed methodologies is focused on underserved populations and individuals who identify at the intersection of identities. In particular her focus is to enhance and advance the health and social care needs of 2SLGBTQIA+ migrants, youths, and older adults.
To learn more about Roya, please visit her website:
https://health.yorku.ca/health-profiles/index.php?dept=&mid=2167026
Email: rvijeh@yorku.ca
Jennifer Hyndman
Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change
Research interests: Refugee Studies, Conflict and Displacement, Gender and Nationalism, Humanitarianism, Immigration and Refugee Resettlement in Canada, Transnationalism, Geographic Regions of South Asia and East Africa.
Email: jhyndman@yorku.ca
Michaela Hynie
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Interim Director, CRS (2022-23)
Research interests: Refugee and immigrant mental health, culture and health access.
Email: mhynie@yorku.ca
Korina Jocson
Associate Professor, Faculty of Education
Korina Jocson is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education. Her scholarly interests include youth cultural studies, digital media technologies, race and ethnic studies in the diasporas, and critical methodologies. She is a U.S.-Canada Fulbright Scholar and served as Visiting Research Chair of Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa. She earned her PhD in Education at UC Berkeley and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.
Email: kjocson@edu.yorku.ca
Christopher Kyriakides
Canada Research Chair, Department of Sociology
Research interests:
Racism, racialization and nationalism; (anti)immigration; the (anti)racist state; social and political theory; geopolitics, culture and communication.
At present Kyriakides is particularly focused on configurations of racialization in relation to the meaning of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and articulations of racism and nationalism in the reception of refugees in Europe, North America and the Middle East.
Email: ckyriak@yorku.ca
Willem Maas
Professor and Jean Monnet Chair, Glendon Political Science
Research interests: Citizenship and migration, free movement, borders and boundaries, European and regional integration, nationality, sovereignty and territory, comparative politics, federalism.
Email: maas@yorku.ca
Aaida Mamuji
Assistant Professor, Disaster & Emergency Management
Dr. Aaida A. Mamuji is an Assistant Professor in Disaster & Emergency Management at York University, and Area Coordinator. Prior to this, she was working in the Humanitarian Assistance & Disaster Response Group of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and International Development (now Global Affairs Canada) as a Policy Advisor, and was the 2013-2014 Cadieux-Léger Fellow. Dr. Mamuji completed her PhD in Public Administration at the University of Ottawa, with a major in Public Policy. Her areas of interest are social vulnerability and capability in the disaster context, hosting and resettlement, international responses to natural disasters, and risk assessment.
Email: amamuji@yorku.ca
Merouan Merkouar
Assistant Professor, International Development Studies
Research interests: Social Movements and Herding Behavior, Middle-Eastern Politics, Humanitarian Crisis, Authoritarian Resilience, Refugee Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Islamic Terrorism
Email: mmekouar@yorku.ca
Nick Mulé
Professor, School of Social Work
Nick J. Mulé, PhD, is a professor in the School of Social Work, cross appointed to the Sexuality Studies Program in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Faculty of Health at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His research interests include the social inclusion/exclusion of LGBTQI populations in social policy and service provision and the degree of their recognition as distinct communities in cultural, systemic, and structural contexts. He also engages in critical analysis of the LGBTQI movement and the development of queer liberation theory. He is Project Director of the $2.5 million SSHRC-funded and first national study, “2SLGBTQ+ Poverty in Canada: Improving Livelihood and Social Wellbeing.” A queer activist for many years, Nick is the founder, past chairperson, secretary, and currently member at large of Queer Ontario.
Email: nickmule@yorku.ca
Yuka Nakamura
Associate Professor, School of Kinesiology and Health Science
Dr. Nakamura studies how race, class and gender, impact people’s identities and sport experiences. She is especially interested in sport organized by ethnic and/or religious groups, as a way to create a sense of community, and the impact of racism and assumptions about race. She is currently focusing on the role of sport in the lives of mixed-race people, and of Muslim men.
Email: nakamura@yorku.ca
Obiora Okafor
Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Research interests: International Law, Human Rights, Immigration/Refugee Law
Email: ookafor@yorku.ca
Valerie Preston
Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change
Research interests: Gender and urban labour markets, immigration and Canadian cities, and the social and economic effects of economic restructuring
Email: vpreston@yorku.ca
Jay Ramasubramanyam
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Science
Ray Ramasubramanyam is an Assistant Professor in the Law & Society Program at York University, Toronto.
Professor Ramasubramanyam obtained his B.A. in Criminology from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (2009). He received a Postgraduate Diploma and LL.M. in International Human Rights from Birmingham City University, United Kingdom (2011) and his Ph.D. from the Department of Law and Legal Studies and the Institute of Political Economy, at Carleton University (2021). His thesis was titled India’s Relationship to the Global Refugee Regime: a legal and historical analysis of the conceptualization of refugeehood.
His research expertise includes forced migration, international refugee law, statelessness, third world approaches to international law, human rights, race and racialization, postcolonial theory, and South Asian studies.
He recently published an article in the Asian Yearbook of International Law on refugee law in the Indian subcontinent, and two book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law.
He was formerly a visiting scholar in the American Bar Association in Washington D.C., and a visiting researcher at the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law in Sydney, Australia.
Prior to his entry into academia, he was employed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a Refugee Status Determination Associate and in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as a Protection Field Officer.
Email: jayram@yorku.ca
Kael Reid
Postdoctoral Fellow, Humanities
Kael Reid is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Children, Childhood & Youth Studies at York University on Dr. Andrea Emberly’s research project entitled, Connecting Culture and Childhood: Using Musical Arts Programming to Promote Belonging for Young Newcomers in the GTA. This study investigates the impact that participation in a children’s community choir has on the resettlement experiences and well-being of newcomer and refugee children. As the Principal Investigator on a SSHRC Explore Grant and the Co-Investigator on a grant from the Child and Youth Refugee Research Coalition (CYRRC), Kael also conducts song writing and recording research with newcomer and refugee children using a methodology they developed called, “collaborative ethnographic songwriting” (CES). CES is a participatory, qualitative, research-creation method used to collect, analyze, and disseminate research data through music while supporting individuals to express, narrate, and document their lived experiences in song. Kael holds a PhD in Education from the University of Toronto, and an MA in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice from The University of British Columbia. As a professional singersongwriter and recording artist, Kael composed and recorded 5 albums and a number of singles. They have toured extensively across Canada, and into the USA and Germany, performing at live music venues; public schools; universities; music and Pride festivals; folk music clubs; youth, arts, and academic conferences; community organizations; union meetings; and in people’s living rooms.
Website: Home - Kael Reid
Email: katereid@yorku.ca
Sean Rehaag
Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School and Director, Centre for Refugee Studies (on sabbatical, 2022-23)
Research interests: Immigration and Refugee Law, Empirical Legal Studies, Judicial/Administrative Decision-Making, Legal Process, Access to Justice, Gender and Sexuality
Email: srehaag@yorku.ca
Rachel Silver
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education
Rachel Silver is an Assistant Professor of Education and co-director of York’s Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project. An anthropologist of education and development, Silver explores how discourses, programs, and policies related to gender and sexuality intersect with young people’s lives in contexts of humanitarian crisis. She has over ten years of experience researching girls’ education in South/Eastern Africa, including in Malawi, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Silver’s other scholarly interests include forced migration and education; state/NGO/international funder relations; international development education policy; and transnational feminisms.
Email: resilver@edu.yorku.ca
James C. Simeon
Associate Professor and Head of McLaughlin College, School of Public Policy and Administration
Research interests: International refugee law, regional refugee rights instruments, asylum and refugee status determination systems, Canadian immigration and refugee policies.
Email: jcsimeon@yorku.ca
Dagmar Soennecken
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration
Research interests: Comparative politics & policy regarding citizenship and migration, refugees and the role of the courts, anti-terrorism issues.
Email: dsoennec@yorku.ca
Antonio Sorge
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Research interests: Globalization, rural social change, ethnicity and nationalism, immigration, cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, politics of anti-immigration and the rise of neo-nationalist parties in Europe. Antonio Sorge has conducted ethnographic research in Sardinia, and latterly on Sicily and the Southern Italian peninsula with a focus on the politics of migration. His current research examines refugee integration within host communities in Italy, as well as the roadblocks to recognition of the cultural and economic needs of newcomers in light of the 2015-2016 refugee “crisis.”
Email: asorge@yorku.ca
Yvonne Su
Assistant Professor, Department of Equity Studies
Yvonne Su is an Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Refugee and Diaspora Studies in the Department of Equity Studies in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. She is also a member of the York Centre for Asia Studies. Yvonne is a specialist on forced migration, climate change-induced displacement, migrant remittances and post-disaster recovery. She holds a PhD in Political Science and International Development from the University of Guelph and a MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford. Broadly, her research interests focus on migration and development, refugee protection and disaster risk reduction. Her current research examines South-South humanitarian responses in the context of forced migration using the case study of Venezuelan LGBTQI+ asylum seekers in Brazil. Previously, Yvonne spent 7 months in the Philippines researching the role of migrant remittances in post-disaster recovery after Typhoon Haiyan. Yvonne’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from SSHRC, IDRC, Canadian Heritage, the Government of Ontario and the Mackenzie King Scholarship Trust. She is also the recipient of over 25 national and international awards and scholarships including the Young Woman of Distinction Award and the University of Guelph’s Young Alumni Award. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Disaster Prevention and Management, Critical Asian Studies, World Development Perspectives and Philippines Political Science Journal.
Email: yvonnesu@yorku.ca
Özgün Topak
Associate Professor, Department of Social Science
Prof. Topak is an interdisciplinary social scientist of surveillance, migration and authoritarianism. His current research focuses on two themes: 1) Forced migration, borders, violence and surveillance, and 2) Authoritarian surveillance. He is primarily interested in the Global South/East contexts (e.g. the MENA and beyond), and the border zones between the Global South/East and North/West (e.g. the Mediterranean.
Research interests: Surveillance; Forced Migration and Borders; Authoritarianism; Human Rights; Critical Criminology; Theory
Email: ozgunt@yorku.ca
Saskia van Viegen
Assistant Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics
Research interests: Bi/multilingualism in education, focusing specifically on language assessment and language teaching and learning in K-12 and postsecondary educational contexts. Related areas of interest include language and content integration, disciplinary literacies, translanguaging pedagogies and biliteracy development.
Email: saskiast@yorku.ca
Daphne Winland
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Research interests: Diaspora and transnationalism, migration, Eastern Europe
Email: winland@yorku.ca
Anna Zalik
Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change
Research interests: Diaspora and transnationalism, migration, Eastern Europe
Email: azalik@yorku.ca