CRS Seminar: Local Integration of Afghan women newcomers in the Toronto GTA
May 25, 2026
11:00am - 12:30pm (Toronto)
This is a virtual event
Zoom:
Guest speakers:
Adela Ludin, Peel Settlement Counsellor, Grant Researcher, and Volunteer Coordinator, Afghan Women’s Organization (AWO) and Cesar Castilla, CRS Visiting Scholar and Independent Researcher
This study examines the local integration (LI) experiences of newly arrived Afghan young women in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), with particular attention to the tensions across legal, cultural, social, and economic dimensions. Working within a critical-interpretivist framework, it draws on biographical narrative interviews with five participants aged 18–24 to explore how integration is experienced and negotiated in everyday life. The analysis reveals a persistent disjunction between formal legal inclusion and actual integration outcomes, particularly in the economic sphere, while also highlighting how legal status shapes—and constrains—social, cultural, and economic trajectories. Rather than unfolding as a linear process, integration appears as uneven and often contradictory, with constraints in one domain reinforcing inequalities across others. In this sense, LI emerges less as a coherent trajectory than as an ongoing negotiation in which formal inclusion coexists with forms of lived exclusion.
Adela Ludin holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from 91ŃÇÉ«. She is associated with the Afghan Women’s Organization (AWO), where she serves as a Peel Settlement Counsellor, Grant Researcher, and Volunteer Coordinator. Her academic work focused on issues of gender and violence, including her 2013 thesis, “Beyond a Violence Against Women Approach: Understanding Violence Against Women in Afghanistan.” Her work reflects a strong commitment to supporting newcomer communities, particularly women, through settlement services, community programming, and capacity building.
Cesar Castilla holds a PhD in International Relations from Université Toulouse 1 Capitole (2014). His research focuses on migration governance and the integration of refugees and migrants, with a particular emphasis on Ecuador. He coordinated the Program of Cultural Integration for Refugees and Immigrants (UH–UNHCR, 2016–2020), where he applied a gender-sensitive approach to support the integration of Afghan and Iranian women.
