CRS Summer Course on Forced Migration: Exploring the intersections between forced migration and technology

For more information and to register, please visit the website: https://www.yorku.ca/crs/programs/summer-course/

This year’s Summer Course is offered in collaboration with Osgoode Hall Law School’s Refugee Law Laboratory and will focus on research, policy, and practices at the intersections of forced migration and technology.

The course will start off with an introductory day and a deep dive into the current state of play. To ensure a baseline level of knowledge for attendees, participants will receive an overview of major trends in forced migration as well as some of the vast array of technologies used for border enforcement, refugee adjudication, and the inspiring innovations by researchers, lawyers, and affected communities aimed at leveling the playing field.

Each subsequent day will then be oriented around a theme. The first theme, The Sharpest Edges of Border Technologies, is an exploration of surveillance technologies and projects used for border enforcement, including a panel discussion on the regulatory gaps in border surveillance globally as well as a conversation with members of displaced communities working with the RLL’s Migration and Technology Monitor directly affected by unregulated and high-risk technologies. The second theme, Helping Tools: How Technologies Are Helping us Understand Refugee Adjudication in Canada and Internationally, will invite reflections from Canadian and international practitioners, policy makers, and academics on the positive and empowering uses of technologies in migration. For a change of scenery, the middle of the week will take us outside of the university for site visits in vibrant downtown Toronto with leading experts in the field. At the end of the week, the course will then wrap up with forward looking exercises and broad discussions about governance, knowledge-production, and how to work with communities at the intersection of technology and migration.

Two public keynotes with noted experts in the field will also bookend the course, one focusing on critical issues in race, gender, and technology, and the other providing a former private sector perspective.  We are curating a lively course that will bring together policy makers, adjudicators, researchers, refugees, and NGO actors together, to share varied perspectives and encourage course participants to share their experiences throughout.