Contributors

Yasmeen Abu-Laban is a professor and Canada Research Chair in the Politics of Citizenship and Human Rights in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. Her published research comparatively addresses subjects relating to ethnic and gender politics; nationalism, globalization, and processes of racialization; immigration policies and politics; surveillance and border control; and multiculturalism and anti-racism. Cutting across this work is a concern with how people are differentially accorded citizenship and human rights. She is co-author (with Ethel Tungohan and Christina Gabriel) of Containing Diversity: Canada and the Politics of Immigration in the 21st Century (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and co-editor (with Alain-G. Gagnon and Arjun Tremblay) of Assessing Multiculturalism in Global Comparative Perspective: A New Politics of Diversity in the Twenty-First Century? (Routledge, 2023).

Jeffrey M. Ayres is a professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, United States. He earned a BA in foreign affairs at the University of Virginia and an MA and PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He teaches courses and conducts research broadly in the areas of comparative and international political economy, regionalism and global governance, and Canadian and North American politics and has published extensively in article, chapter, and book form. He is co-editor of Globalization and Food Sovereignty: Global and Local Change in the New Politics of Food (University of Toronto Press, 2014), North America in Question: Regional Integration in an Era of Political Turbulence (University of Toronto Press, 2012), and Contentious Politics in North America: National Protest and Transnational Collaboration Under Continental Integration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and author of Defying Conventional Wisdom: Political Movements and Popular Contention Against North American Free Trade (University of Toronto Press, 1998). He has held the Fulbright Research Chair in North American Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and has twice been a Visiting Researcher at Carleton’s Institute of Political Economy.

Abigail B. Bakan is a professor in the Department of Social Justice in Education (SJE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and cross-appointed to the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. Her research is in the area of anti-oppression politics, with a focus on intersections of gender, race, class, political economy, and citizenship. Her publications include Theorizing Anti-racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories (co-edited with Enakshi Dua; University of Toronto Press, 2014), Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System (with Daiva Stasiulis; University of Toronto Press, 2007), Critical Political Studies: Debates and Dialogues from the Left (co-edited with Eleanor MacDonald; McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), and Employment Equity Policy in Canada: An Interprovincial Comparison (with Audrey Kobayashi; Status of Women Canada, 2000). Her articles have appeared in Race and Class, Social Identities, Rethinking Marxism, Politikon, Socialist Studies, Atlantis, Signs, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and Studies in Political Economy. Her current SSHRC-funded research, with Yasmeen Abu-Laban, addresses processes of human rights regarding race, gender, and Indigeneity in the context of United Nations world conferences. Their co-authored recent volume, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race: Exploring Identity and Power in a Global Context, is published by I.B. Tauris Publishers, an imprint of Bloomsbury (2020).

Jalal Barzanji is a highly respected Canadian-Kurdish writer and journalist. He has published eight books of poetry, a memoir, and numerous critical columns. After his two-year imprisonment by Saddam Hussein’s regime in the late 1980s and further political repression into the 1990s, he and his family fled to Turkey. They remained there for eleven months, eventually immigrating to Canada, where he has resided for more than twenty years. He is a City of Edmonton Hall of Fame member; he was Pen Canada’s first Writer in Exile and the recipient of an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Alberta.

Pallabi Bhattacharyya was a postdoctoral fellow in sociology and international development studies at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was a member of the Canadian Research Team for the Violence Against Women Refugees and Migrants: Analyzing Causes and Effective Policy Response project. She completed her PhD from the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba. Her PhD research focuses on the rights, agency, and empowerment of refugee women and youth in Canada. In the past thirteen years, her major research experiences include projects with UNICEF; UNESCO; WHO; the British Council; the Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council program; the Child and Youth Refugee Research Coalition project by the European Union; Immigration Research West (IRW); Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC); Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Fariborz Birjandian has served on committees, boards, and task forces related to immigration, refugees, diversity, equal rights, and the cultural arts from the local to the international levels. He became a refugee when he left his home country of Iran with his family in 1987. His involvement and work with refugees began in 1987 and has continued these past thirty-plus years. He initially began this work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and once settled in Canada, he volunteered with several organizations, including the Red Cross and Calgary Catholic Immigration Society (CCIS). In his role as CEO of CCIS, he leads 300 staff members and 1,600 volunteers as they deliver approximately eighty programs and services designed to aid the settlement and integration of immigrants and refugees in Calgary, Alberta, and its surrounding communities. He has been instrumental in designing and initiating numerous methodologies related to settlement and integration, including the UNHCR Settlement Handbook, which is used nationally and internationally. He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his community involvement and for his commitment to ensuring that institutions, advisory groups, and all levels of government work to recognize the needs and challenges faced by newcomers, promote the creation of welcoming and engaged communities, and recognize and celebrate diversity.

Chiedza Chikawa-Araga received her bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Oregon and became a certified public accountant after moving to Canada. She has worked as an accountant in the non-profit, private, and public sectors. Apart from accounting, she works with her father, Thomas Mapfumo, as part of his business/management team.

Michael Frishkopf (frishkopf.org, m4ghd.org) is a professor of music, the director of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology, and an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies at the University for Development Studies, Ghana. His field and action research, centering on the Arab world and West Africa, includes music and Islam, music and development, global health, music as medicine, music and architecture, digital repositories, social network analysis, virtual and augmented reality, and machine learning.

Jim Gurnett works with community organizations as a consultant and as Inner City Pastoral Ministry’s pastoral associate. He has been a school teacher and principal in Alberta and Afghanistan, the director of social-profit organizations such as the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers and Bissell Centre, the founding executive director of the University of Alberta research center The Hope Foundation, an adult educator, a journalist, and a community activist. His political activity has included serving as the MLA for the Spirit River-Fairview constituency and the executive director for the government caucus at the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. He is a board member at the Edmonton Intercultural Centre. His focus is often on social justice issues and the importance of building community. His life is enriched by ten grandchildren.

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is a professor of sociology with a focus on culture and migration at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main. Previously to this position, she was a professor of general sociology at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Moreover, she is an adjunct professor in sociology at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a visiting professor in CRISHET (Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation), Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. In 2020/21, she was a Digital Senior Fellow in the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre: Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila), São Paulo. Among her many publications is the important book Migration, Domestic Work and Affect (Routledge, 2010) and her recently published book Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons: Migration-Coloniality Necropolitics and Conviviality Infrastructure (Anthem, 2023). More recently, she has published with Shirley Anne Tate The Palgrave Handbook in Critical Race and Gender (Palgrave, 2022), with Rhoda Reddock Decolonial Perspectives on Entangled Inequalities: Europe and the Caribbean (Anthem, 2021), and with Pinar Tuzcu Migrantischer Feminismus in der deutschen Frauenbewegung, 1985–2000 (Assemblage, 2021). Her work engages with affective labour, materialities, institutional racism, racial capitalism, and the coloniality of migration.

Louise Harrington is an assistant professor in post-colonial and contemporary literatures in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She works primarily on cultural representations of war and ethno-religious-national conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, specializing in the comparative study of Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and South Asia. She has further research interests in critical border studies, geocriticism, spatial literary studies, and migration. Among her publications are articles in South Asian Diaspora, Postcolonial Text, and South Asian Review and essays in the edited collections The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature (2024), Partitions and Their Afterlives (Rowman and Littlefield 2019), The Cosmic and the Corporeal: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Time, Space and Body (Institute of Interdisciplinary Inquiry 2016), and Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (Rodopi 2014).

Reza Hasmath (PhD, Cambridge) is a professor of political science at the University of Alberta. He has previously held faculty positions in management, sociology, and political science at the Universities of Toronto, Melbourne, and Oxford and has worked for think tanks, consultancies, development agencies, and NGOs in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and China. His award-winning research looks at the global life course experiences of ethnic minorities. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Civil Society.

Benjamin Ho is a professor of economics at Vassar College and author of the book Why Trust Matters: An Economist’s Guide to the Ties That Bind Us (Columbia University Press, 2021). Professor Ho applies behavioral economics tools like game theory and experimental methods to tackle topics like apologies, identity, inequality, and climate change. Before Vassar, he taught MBA students at Cornell, where he was selected as one of Poets and Quants 40 under 40, served as lead energy economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and worked/consulted for Morgan Stanley and several tech startups. Professor Ho is also a faculty affiliate for the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. His research has appeared in outlets like Management Science and Nature: Human Behavior. Professor Ho holds seven degrees from Stanford and MIT in economics, education, political science, math, computer science, and electrical engineering.

Jwamer Jalal arrived in Canada as a child in a family of United Nations–sponsored Kurdish refugees fleeing war in Iraq. A University of Alberta alum, he is currently the managing coordinator of the Alberta Ministry of Health’s Immigrant Youth Mental Health Initiative at the Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative—a not-for-profit organization that started twenty-five years ago to support Edmonton’s newcomers.

Solomon Kay-Reid is completing a JD at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.

Nariya Khasanova is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta and master’s degree holder in Sustainable Urban Governance and Peace from the United Nations–mandated University for Peace (2013). Her doctoral research examines reproductive justice in immigrant and refugee families in Canada. Passionate about migration studies, sustainable development, and human rights, she has served as a research assistant in two SSHRC-funded projects, including “The UN as a Knowledge Producer: World Conferences on Women, Racialized, and Indigenous Peoples” and “Migration and Precarity: From the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to Permanent Resident, Student and Undocumented Migrant Status.” Prior to joining the University of Alberta, she was also a visiting scholar at George Washington University, a project officer at the United Nations Association in Canada, an intern at national and regional UNDP offices in Uzbekistan and Bratislava, and a policy analyst at the Government of Alberta.

Anna Kirova is a professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Alberta. She has served as Education Domain Leader and Children, Family and Youth Research Domain Leader with the Prairie Metropolis Centre of Excellence in Research on Immigration, Integration, and Diversity and on the Board of Governors of Immigration Research West (IRW). Her research focuses on the need for understanding culturally and linguistically diverse families with young children’s experiences in school and the possibility such an understanding offers for culturally responsive pedagogy. Her work has been published in national and international academic journals.

Thomas Mapfumo is a world-renowned musician from Zimbabwe, known for creating and popularizing Chimurenga music, in which he incorporated Western instruments with traditional Zimbabwean instruments, singing in Shona and addressing political themes during and post the colonisation war. Chimurenga music was built on the struggle of Black Rhodesians and the country’s traditional music. It was a sound that gave the natives an identity and a voice during a time when they didn’t seem to have a voice. Due to his contribution to music and activism, Mapfumo received an honorary master’s degree in recognition of advocacy for freedom from the University of Zimbabwe in 1999 and an honorary doctorate degree in music from Ohio University at Athens in 2001. However, as the political climate shifted in Zimbabwe, Mapfumo’s music became increasingly critical of the government. He faced censorship and threats, leading him to move his family to the United States in 2000 for safety. Despite his exile, he remained committed to creating and performing music that challenged the status quo. In 2018, after fourteen years, Mapfumo returned to Zimbabwe for a concert, citing positive political changes. However, he hasn’t returned since 2019 due to concerns about the ruling regime. Throughout his career, Mapfumo has been a resilient voice, using his music to express social and political dissent.

Labe Songose is an Integration Program Officer at IRCC (Settlement Network). She graduated from the University of Manitoba with a master’s degree in sociology. Her areas of research interest are in immigrants’ and refugees’ settlement and integration, immigrant and refugee women’s well-being, and immigration policies.

Dana Waissi holds a double major psychology and English degree from the University of Alberta. He is Kurdish but was born in an Iraqi refugee camp and came to Canada when he was four years old with his family and was raised in Edmonton. His goal is to continue his studies and become a neuroscientist. In tandem with his studies, Dana has also mastered the keyboard and a Kurdish instrument (Saz) and has steadily worked with various musical softwares to mix and master multilayered music tracks while curating a YouTube channel in which he showcases his musical compositions. He is also the recipient of a URI Undergraduate Research Stipend for work on Kurdish cultural production and takes every opportunity to discuss and engage in work on Kurdish identity and its place in Canadian society.

Lori Wilkinson is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. She is the Canada Research Chair-Tier 1 in Migration Futures and, in 2023, was awarded the title Distinguished University Professor at the University of Manitoba. Her current program of research centers on the resettlement and integration experiences of immigrants and refugees. She is the director of Immigration Research West, a multidisciplinary group of over one hundred members who work together to educate Canadians about the contributions of newcomers. Her research has been published in several international and national academic journals and reports to national and international governments.