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.

The post CRS Seminar: Bordering and Un-bordering: Dismantling Racially Coded Dynamics in Social-Political Landscapes in Canadian Higher Education Institutions appeared first on Centre for Refugee Studies.

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鈥檚 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鈥�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鈥攁nd constrains鈥攕ocial, 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鈥檚 degree in Sociology from 91亚色. She is associated with the Afghan Women鈥檚 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, 鈥淏eyond a Violence Against Women Approach: Understanding Violence Against Women in Afghanistan.鈥� 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 Universit茅 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鈥揢NHCR, 2016鈥�2020), where he applied a gender-sensitive approach to support the integration of Afghan and Iranian women.

The post CRS Seminar: Local Integration of Afghan women newcomers in the Toronto GTA appeared first on Centre for Refugee Studies.