Gemechu Abeshu

Gemechu Abeshu is a researcher with a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Bayreuth University of Germany, and M.A. in Governance and Development from Antwerp University of Belgium. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow at York University of Canada. Gemechu's research interest includes refugee and forced displacements, racialized refugee experiences, and emerging new forms of non-state power. He is a research affiliate at Centre for Refugee Studies (York University) and Refugee Law Initiative (Oxford University). Abeshu currently co-leads (with Christopher Kyriakides) the recently launched CRS sub-committee on Racisms and Refuge.

Aderomola Adeola

Aderomola specializes in the fields of migration, refugee studies, human rights and internal displacement. She has contributed significantly to discussions in these fields through academic publications, advocacy and policy development. She led the Global Engagement Network on Internal Displacement in Africa (GENIDA) and lectured at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and McGill University in Canada where she was previously a Steinberg Fellow in International Migration Law and Policy. She co-led the expert team in the drafting of the African Commission’s General Comment on the Right to Free Movement of Persons in Africa (article 12(1) of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights). She has also published in her areas of specialization and some of her contributions (monographs and edited/co-edited works) include: The Internally Displaced Person in International Law (Edward Elgar, 2020), The Art of Human Rights: Commingling Art, Human Rights and the Law in Africa (Springer, 2020) and Compliance with international human rights law in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Idil Atak

Idil Atak is an associate professor within the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Ryerson University and the Faculty of Arts’ Criminology Department. She received her PhD from the Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Law. She was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the McGill Centre for Human Rights & Legal Pluralism. Atak is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies (IJMBS). She is a member of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration’s (IASFM) executive committee and a past president of the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (CARFMS). From 1994 to 2004, Atak served as a legal expert for the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ankara, then as deputy to the Permanent Representative of Turkey to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France.

Amar Bhatia

Amar Bhatia joined Osgoode’s full-time faculty on July 1, 2014, after serving as a Catalyst Fellow and Visiting Professor at Osgoode for the 2013-14 academic year. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and postcolonial literature (Queen’s; Sussex) and received an LLB from Osgoode in 2005. While an LLB student at Osgoode, he worked and volunteered with CLASP, the Innocence Project, Duty Counsel’s office, and Parkdale Community Legal Services. He then articled and worked in union-side labour and employment law in Toronto before returning to graduate school. He subsequently obtained an LLM from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (U of T), where he received the Howland Prize for most outstanding performance in the program. He was awarded a SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship to pursue his SJD, which he obtained from U of T. His dissertation looked at issues of status and authority of migrant workers and Indigenous peoples under Canadian immigration law, Aboriginal law, treaty relations, and Indigenous legal traditions. In addition to his research, Professor Bhatia has also been active at Osgoode by co-editing the Journal of Law Social Policy, serving on the Admissions Committee, sitting on the Board of Directors for Parkdale Community Legal Services, and being a member of the Third World Approaches to International Law Review’s editorial collective. He has taught a variety of courses at Osgoode, including property law, refugee law, globalization & the law (focused on migrant work), and co-directing the Intensive Program in Indigenous Lands, Resources and Governments.

Hilary Evans Cameron

A former litigator, Hilary Evans Cameron represented refugee claimants for a decade and now holds a doctorate in refugee law from the University of Toronto. A major focus of her work has been the process of judging a refugee claimant’s credibility. Her research brings insights from the social sciences, particularly cognitive psychology, to bear on this central aspect of refugee status decision-making. She has also explored other legal barriers that prevent people without status from accessing the courts and from winning their cases on judicial review. Her interest in clinical legal pedagogy arose from her experience teaching at the legal clinic of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, where she developed a method for involving law students in stopping deportations. She is the author of Refugee Law’s Fact-finding Crisis: Truth, Risk, and the Wrong Mistake (Cambridge 2018) and has written in a number of journals including the International Journal of Refugee Law; Canadian Journal of Administrative Law and Practice; Journal of Law and Social Policy; Canadian Journal of Human Rights; Dalhousie Law Journal; UBC Law Review. Before coming to Ryerson, Evans Cameron was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School, as well as a lecturer at Trinity College in the University of Toronto in the Ethics, Society and Law program. She was the SSHRC’s 2017 Bora Laskin National Fellow in Human Rights Research.

Christina Clark-Kazak

Christina Clark-Kazak is Associate Professor, School of Public and International Affairs, Past President of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration and immediate past Editor-in-chief of Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees. She has previously worked for York University, Saint Paul University, the Canadian government and the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. She has also served as President of the Canadian Associate for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Director of York University's Centre for Refugee Studies and Associate Principal (Research and Graduate Studies) at York's bilingual Glendon campus. Her work is published in books and articles in international migration and development. She has received continuous research funding since her doctorate from the Canadian and British governments and non-governmental organizations.

Don Dippo

Don Dippo is a University Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University. His interests include: the social and political organization of knowledge, environmental and sustainability education, global migration and settlement; university/community relations; and teacher education. Together with Professor Rachel Silver, he co-directs the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project (http://www.bher.org ), an initiative designed to bring post-secondary education opportunities to people living in the Dadaab refugee camps in northeastern Kenya. He is an affiliate of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University and is on the Board of Directors of Success Beyond Limits, a not-for-profit, community-based organization that supports high school age youth in Toronto’s Jane/Finch community.

James Hathaway

James Hathaway is the founding director of Michigan Law's Program in Refugee and Asylum Law and the Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Refugee Law at the University of Amsterdam. From 2008 to 2010, Professor Hathaway was on leave to serve as dean of the Melbourne Law School, where he established Australia's first all-graduate (JD) law program. Before joining the Michigan Law faculty in 1998, he was professor of law and associate dean of the Osgoode Hall Law School (Toronto), and has been appointed a visiting professor at the universities of Cairo, California, Macerata, San Francisco, Stanford, Toronto, and Tokyo. He regularly provides training on refugee law to academic, non-governmental, and official audiences around the world. Professor Hathaway's publications include The Law of Refugee Status (2014), with Michelle Foster; Transnational Law: Cases and Materials (2013), with Mathias Reimann, Timothy Dickinson, and Joel Samuels; Human Rights and Refugee Law (2013); The Rights of Refugees Under International Law (2005); Reconceiving International Refugee Law (1997); and more than 80 journal articles. He is founding patron and senior adviser to Asylum Access, a nonprofit organization committed to delivering innovative legal aid to refugees in the Global South, and counsel on international protection to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. Professor Hathaway sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Immigration and Nationality Law Reports, and reflaw.org

Kassahun Hiticha

Kassahun Hiticha is an Ethiopian-Oromo refugee living in Dadaab refugee camp in North Eastern Kenya. He graduated from York University, as part of the Dadaab Cohort of students through BHER, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Educational Studies in June 2019, and a Master's of Education: Language, Culture and Teaching in June 2021. He has been working with Windle International Kenya as a secondary school teacher for over a decade, and also works as a Peer Mentor for Cohort 3 undergraduate students based in Dadaab Refugee camp since September 2019 to date.

Michaela Hynie

Michaela Hynie is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at York University. She conducts qualitative and quantitative collaborative, multidisciplinary and community-based research in two broad areas of well-being. The first focuses on building and evaluating the impact of social networks and social support, locally, nationally and internationally. Her second area of research examines settlement and integration among migrants. In this area she emphasizes refugee resettlement processes as a function of resettlement policies and services, and health care and mental health in relation to migration status and culture. She is also the founder of the Program Evaluation Unit in the York Institute for Health Research, a unit that conducts, and builds capacity for, program evaluation in the area of health and well being in small not-for-profit organizations. In the field of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, She is an Executive Committee Member of both the Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS) and the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (CARFMS). Her areas of research include Community-based Research, Immigration, Mental Health, Sexuality, and Social Psychology.

HaEun Kim

HaEun Kim is the BHER Project Administrator. She completed her MEd in Language, Culture and Teaching at York University. Her research interests include language and literacy education, teacher education, forced migration and refugee studies, and understanding barriers that prevent access to learning in urban contexts such as Toronto as well as settings considered to be ‘education in emergencies’. She is also a certified secondary school teacher and prior to BHER, worked as an outreach worker running preventative programs for youth and families living in high-priority communities in Toronto, Canada. 

Christopher Kyriakides

Christopher Kyriakides holds the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship, Social Justice and Ethno-Racialization, and is an Executive Committee member of the Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS) at York University. He is a former Research Fellow of the Centre for Research in Racism, Ethnicity and Nationalism, University of Glasgow and of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol. Drawing from Ethnic and Racial Studies and Refugee Studies to identify racialized refuge as a discrete field of enquiry, Kyriakides’ research has focused on racialized reception contexts globally, to include Europe, North America, the Middle East and most recently, Africa and South America. Kyriakides currently co-leads (with Gemechu Abeshu) the recently launched CRS sub-committee on Racisms and Refuge.

Julie Lassonde

Julie Lassonde is a performance artist in the visual and media arts, as well as a social justice lawyer. Her work involves movement, object manipulation, and audio and video recordings. In 2014-2015, she was an artist-in-residence at Osgoode Hall Law School. With arts councils’ support, her work has been presented locally and internationally.

Audrey Macklin

Audrey Macklin is a professor at the Faculty of Law. She holds law degrees from Yale and Toronto, and a bachelor of science degree from Alberta. After graduating from Toronto, she served as law clerk to Mme Justice Bertha Wilson at the Supreme Court of Canada. She was appointed to the faculty of Dalhousie Law School in 1991, promoted to Associate Professor 1998, moved to the University of Toronto in 2000, and became a full professor in 2009. While teaching at Dalhousie, she also served as a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board. Professor Macklin’s teaching areas include criminal law, administrative law, and immigration and refugee law. Her research and writing interests include transnational migration, citizenship, forced migration, feminist and cultural analysis, and human rights. She has published on these subjects in journals such as Refuge and Canadian Woman Studies, and in collections of essays such as The Security of Freedom: Essays on Canada's Anti-Terrorism Bill and Engendering Forced Migration.

James Milner

James Milner is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Carleton University. He is also currently Project Director of LERRN: The Local Engagement Refugee Research Network, a 7-year, SSHRC-funded partnership between researchers and civil society actors primarily in Canada, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon and Tanzania. He has been a researcher, practitioner and policy advisor on issues relating to the global refugee regime, global refugee policy and the politics of asylum in the global South. In recent years, he has undertaken field research in Burundi, Guinea, Kenya, India, Tanzania and Thailand, and has presented research findings to stakeholders in New York, Geneva, London, Ottawa, Bangkok, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and elsewhere. He has worked as a Consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in India, Cameroon, Guinea and its Geneva Headquarters. He is author of Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), co-author (with Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher) of UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection (Routledge, 2012), and co-editor of Refugees’ Roles in Resolving Displacement and Building Peace: Beyond Beneficiaries(Georgetown University Press, 2019) and Protracted Refugee Situations: Political, Human Rights and Security Implications (UN University Press, 2008).

Petra Molnar

Petra Molnar is a lawyer and researcher specializing in technology, migration, and human rights. She is currently working with EDRi, Homo Digitalis, and other partner organizations on a project looking at the impacts of migration control technologies on the lives of people on the move, funded by the Mozilla and Ford Foundations. Petra also works on issues around immigration detention, health and human rights, gender-based violence, and the politics of refugee, immigration, and international law. Her work has appeared in numerous academic publications and the popular press, including the New York Times. Petra is also the co-author of “Bots at the Gate,” an internationally recognized report on the human rights impacts of automated decision-making in immigration and refugee systems. She holds a Master of Arts in Anthropology from York University, a Juris Doctorate from the University of Toronto, and an LL.M in International Law from the University of Cambridge.

Kenya-Jade Pinto

Kenya-Jade Pinto is an Indo-Kenyan-Canadian documentary photographer, filmmaker, and lawyer. She grew up chasing crabs on the Kenyan coast, before moving to Alberta’s foothills as a teen. KJ’s hyphenated worldview informs her work where she focuses on non-fiction and narrative projects that navigate themes of displacement, belonging, and access to justice. KJ’s training as a human rights lawyer has deepened her practice as a documentary photographer on projects like Not Yet Home, Level Justice, and more recently, The Sandbox. She is an Associate Producer on Scarborough (2021), a film based on the award-winning novel by Catherine Hernandez. She has experience as a legal and archival researcher, helping to shape and guide storytelling on feature-length documentaries, and produces and co-hosts The Ways We Are, a podcast that explores personal identity and unpacks the seemingly fragmented bits. In 2020, KJ was named an emerging filmmaker fellow by HotDocs and supported by Netflix. She recently joined the Refugee Law Lab at York University as filmmaker-in-residence, where she is documenting the impact of migration management technology on people on the move. KJ is a member of Women Photograph, Diversify Photo, the Visual Researchers’ Society of Canada, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations as well as a Juris Doctor (cum laude) with a specialization in International law. She is a member in good standing of the Law Society of Ontario and is a working group member of the Racial Equity Media Collective. KJ volunteers with the Toronto Refugee Sponsorship Support Program, where she guides groups through private refugee sponsorship. She is based between Toronto, Athens, and Nairobi and is available for assignments at hello@kenyajade.com.

Jay Ramasubramanyam

Jay Ramasubramanyam is an Assistant Professor (Teaching) 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). He is a global south migration researcher. 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. His research explores the asymmetries of power, knowledge production and the ostensible legitimacy of norms in the field of refugee studies and refugee law. 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 formerly taught in Carleton University in the areas of social justice and human rights, refugee rights, international law, and race and racialization. In recognition of his teaching excellence, he won the Contract Instructor Teaching Award. 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.

Sean Rehaag

Sean Rehaag is the Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies and the Director of the Refugee Law Laboratory. He specializes in immigration and refugee law, administrative law, legal process, access to justice, and new legal technologies. He frequently contributes to public debates about immigration and refugee law, and he engages in law reform efforts in these areas. He is also committed to exploring innovative teaching methodologies, with a particular interest in clinical and experiential education. From 2015 to 2018, he served as the Academic Director at Parkdale Community Legal Services. His  interdisciplinary academic research focuses on empirical studies of immigration and refugee law decision-making processes. He currently holds an SSHRC grant involving new legal technologies, artificial intelligence and quantitative research on Canadian refugee adjudication. He is also pursuing research using experiments to better understand how refugee adjudicators make credibility assessments. In 2013, he received the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “Judicial Review of Refugee Determinations: The Luck of the Draw?”. He publishes yearly statistics on Canada’s refugee determination system. Many of his publications are available open-access on SSRN. Prior to joining the Osgoode faculty in 2008, Professor Rehaag was a visiting scholar at the Université de Montreal’s Chaire de recherche du Canada en droit international des migrations. He has also been a visiting scholar with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Hastings, a visiting researcher at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and an instructor at the University of Victoria and the Université de Sherbrooke. He holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto, bachelor’s degrees in civil law and common law from McGill University, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of British Columbia.

Rachel Silver

Rachel Silver is an Assistant Professor at York University and Co-Director of the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project. Rachel’s research connects insights from the field of comparative and international education and the anthropologies of gender, development, and policy. She uses ethnographic methods to critically explore how discourses, programs, and policies related to gender and education intersect with young people’s lives. Rachel has conducted extensive fieldwork in Southern and Eastern Africa, including in Malawi and Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps, as well as with refugee communities resettled in the US. Her other scholarly interests include forced migration and education; state/NGO/international funder relations; international development education policy; and transnational feminisms. Rachel's current research, conducted with Alyssa Morley (Michigan State University), examines gendered discourses of risk and girls' experiences during COVID-19 in Southern Malawi.

Mirco Stella

Mirco Stella is an international PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at York University and a Teaching Assistant on the BHER (Borderless Higher Education for Refugees) Project. He holds an MA in International Development Studies and has experiences in both international and local NGO work as well as grassroots activism and mobilization.  

He speaks multiple languages - including Italian, English, French, Portuguese, as well as some Kiswahili and Spanish- and is drawn to spaces that promote interculturalism and pluriversality. His choice to work within the field of education is fueled by a desire to capture and explore the politics of hope, of the possible, that “risks” arising in/from any educational encounter, in that fleeting time together, despite schooling’s modern/colonial telos of national and global development which has induced its increasing marketization. He situates his work in an aporia: outside-in the tension between the numerous discourses presenting education as a global solution and the many ways that education continues to be implicated, epistemologically and ontologically, in the production of our current global challenges, including a feral and devastating capitalism that inflates the intensity of climate change as well as the resurgence of colonial divides of race and nations, both factors of unprecedented instability and migrations.   

Yvonne Su

Yvonne Su is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Equity Studies at York University. She is a member of the Centre for Refugee Studies and the York Centre for Asian Research. 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.

Azadeh Tamjeedi

Azadeh Tamjeedi is a Senior Legal Officer at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in Canada. She has worked with UNHCR since 2017 and is currently based in Ottawa. During her time with UNHCR she also worked at the office in Vancouver for two years. In 2018, Azadeh completed an emergency deployment to Boa Vista, Brazil to assist with the large number of Venezuelans arriving in the country. Prior to working with UNHCR, Azadeh worked as a lawyer at the Centre Francophone de Toronto where she represented asylum-seekers before the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) and the Federal Court of Canada. As a law student, she specialized in social justice issues and gained valuable advocacy experience at the Parkdale Legal Clinic in the area of poverty law. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Honours History and Political Science from McGill University and a Juris Doctorate degree from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. Azadeh was called to the Ontario bar in 2011.

Simon Wallace

Simon Wallace is a PhD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, where he researches deportations from Canada. Deportation decisions and bordering practices shape, and are shaped by, racially charged notions of who belongs. By examining the decisions to institute proceedings and the decisions to deport, his research will show how and why the deportation power is deployed. Recognizing that deportation is a modern form of banishment with significant and often irrevocable stakes, his research additionally considers the effectiveness and availability of humanitarian and rights-based defences. Simon is a refugee lawyer, with a particular interest in deportation defence work and the rights of prisoners. After working as a sole practitioner, he joined the Refugee Law Office as its first full-time immigration detention lawyer. He has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada, the Federal Court of Canada, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the Ontario Court of Justice, the Ontario Parole Board, and the Immigration and Refugee Board. He completed his BA (Hons.) and MA at Trent University. He obtained his JD at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.