Research Forum on immigration, borders, and social justice


School of Social Work SW3B03 Transnational Lives in a Globalizing World presents: Research Forum on Immigration, Borders, and Social Justice. The forum includes a set of presentations that move us through considerations of borders, border crossings and their effects on international migrants. Tuesday, Dec 5, 2017, 2:30-4:30 p.m., BSB-136

Speakers List:

Vic Satzewich: Researching the ‘immigration industry’: Canada’s overseas visa offices and  immigration consultants

Dr. Vic Satzewich is Professor of Sociology at McMaster. His most recent books include Points of Entry: How Canada’s Immigration Officers Decide Who Gets In (UBC Press) and ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Canada: A Critical Introduction (Oxford University Press). His current SSHRC funded project is a study of the immigration consulting industry.

Elene Lam: Crossing Borders: Transnational Sex Work

Elene Lam (LLM, LLB, MSW, BSW) is completing her PhD in Social Work at McMaster. She is the founder and executive director of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has been involved in activism in the fields of sex work, migration and labour movements for more than 17 years.

Ameil Joseph: Immigration detention in Canada: A historical confluence of gendered ideas of the dangerous, the racialized, the immigrant, the biologically mad threat

Dr. Ameil Joseph is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work. He draws on perspectives of critical forensic mental health, mad studies, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and critical disability studies to analyze the historical production of ideas about difference, normalcy, sexuality, eugenics, race, ability and mental “illness” as they cohere, diverge, interdepend and perform within policy, law and practice. He is also the author of Deportation and the Confluence of Violence within Forensic Mental Health and Immigration Systems (Palgrave-MacMillan).

Mirna E. Carranza: Exploring the intersection of immigration, gender, trauma and its impact on mental health

Dr. Mirna E. Carranza is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work. Her research experience spans two decades across the Americas with Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descent women, men and children. One of her recent research projects, in collaboration with the Immigrant Working Centre, the Emergency Support Committee for Refugees and the Hamilton Community Legal Clinic, examines the intersection of immigrant women’s acculturation and mental health, which also led to the popular theatre production of “We are not the Others”.

Free and open to the public.

When: Tuesday, Dec 5, 2017, 2:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Where: BSB136

The presentations will be followed by a Q & A session.

For more information, please contact Dr. Rachel Zhou (zhoura@mcmaster.ca) and Ayak Wel (wela@mcmaster.ca).