CRS Seminar: Bordering and Un-bordering: Dismantling Racially Coded Dynamics in Social-Political Landscapes in Canadian Higher Education Institutions
May 20, 2026
1:00 - 2:30pm (EST / Toronto
This is a virtual event
Zoom:
Guest speakers:
Zuhra Abawi, Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at 91亚色鈥檚 Faculty of Education and Nidhi Menon, Assistant Professor at the University of New Brunswick's Faculty of Education
We are at the helm of an era of significant geopolitical turmoil engendered by western military imperialism, climate catastrophe and corporate greed that has displaced and disenfranchised over 100 million people worldwide. While the migration-higher education nexus has become increasingly conspicuous, the agencies, perspectives and epistemic contributions of refugee students in higher education institutions (HEIs) has been largely silenced from mainstream internationalization discourses. Canada is often designated as a top resettlement country for refugees, yet pathways and access to HEIs for refugee-background students remain deeply inequitable and shaped by entrenched overarching hierarchies of North/South geographies. Canada is widely praised across the globe for its purported commitments to multiculturalism and diversity; however, white supremacist and settler-colonial logic continue to demarcate which displaced bodies are constructed as deserving of education, opportunity, and protection and which are not. These racially coded dynamics underpin how forced migration, bordering, race, and higher education intersect within the internationalization arena, determining who is positioned as a global learner and who is subjected to invisibility within Canadian HEIs. This seminar draws on feminist decolonial perspectives to make visible the invisibility of refugee students within the HEI social-political landscape upheld by racialized processes of bordering and un-bordering grounded in genealogies of colonialism, whiteness and empire.
Dr. Zuhra Abawi is an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at 91亚色鈥檚 Faculty of Education. Her research draws on antiracism, anti-colonialism and discourses of state development to frame refugee access to education in host countries along Global North/South geographies. She is particularly interested in the politics of deservingness in determining access to education as an epistemic good of the state and how hegemonic power relations informed by whiteness undergird constructions and categorizations of humanity.
Dr. Nidhi Menon is an Assistant Professor at the University of New Brunswick's Faculty of Education. A feminist scholar, she mobilizes Global South feminisms and decolonial theory to illuminate the strengths and struggles of immigrant and refugee communities in Canadian contexts. Her work refuses the separation between the scholarly and the personal.
