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Imroze Singh Goindval is a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, where his dissertation examines how Panjabi families understand and organize care for kin with cognitive and developmental differences across two transnational field sites: Panjab, India and British Columbia, Canada. His work sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, feminist political economy, and knowledge translation. Before his PhD, Imroze trained as a graphic and service designer, holds a Master of Design in Inclusive Design, and worked as a certified medical interpreter — experiences that continue to shape how he thinks about research, community engagement, and what useful knowledge actually looks like. He is also an immigrant from Goindval, Panjab.
Can you tell us about your research and what drew you to studying migration, disability, and care?
I grew up in Goindval, in Amritsar district, Panjab, where the events of 1984 and their aftermath were not distant history. My parents survived both the violence and the unrest that followed through the 1990s. Growing up, I watched how debility gets structurally managed: who receives care, who is concealed, and whose suffering goes unacknowledged. When my family migrated to Canada when I was 14, I recognized those same dynamics operating through different systems. Later, working as a medical interpreter, I sat in rooms where Panjabi families received diagnoses they had no community language to process. I watched families immediately ask how to hide a diagnosis, not how to support their child. That gap between the clinical encounter and the community reality is where my research lives.
You integrate arts-based and community-engaged research (ABER) into your work. How do these choices influence both the research process and the kinds of outcomes you aim for?
Before my PhD, I spent years as a digital and service designer. When I transitioned to medical interpreting, I kept noticing how poorly designed health materials were: dense, jargon-heavy, and largely inaccessible even to English-speaking patients. For Panjabi-speaking migrant families, those materials were nearly useless. My approach to arts-based and community-engaged research draws directly from human-centred design. Communities are not research subjects to be studied and then handed a report. They are co-designers. The goal is to build knowledge with the people whose lives it concerns, in forms that are actually usable. Art, in its multiple tangible forms, makes that kind of deep collaboration possible. The research process becomes inseparable from the knowledge it produces.
How do you adapt your knowledge mobilization strategies to the different communities and contexts you work with?
One thing I have learned is that knowledge mobilization cannot be generic. A strategy that works for a practitioner training in Vancouver may be entirely inadequate for a family in Amritsar. My current work involves developing bilingual toolkits for Panjabi-speaking families navigating neurodevelopmental and intellectual disability systems in British Columbia. The Panjabi versions are not translations. They are transcreations: reconstructed materials that carry meaning across different knowledge systems, including concepts that have no direct clinical equivalent. I am also testing these tools simultaneously in Panjab, which means the learning flows in multiple directions. The diaspora community and the families in the motherland are connected, and the strategies have to reflect that.
How has the CMS Graduate Certificate in Migration Studies enriched your doctoral training, and in what ways does it complement your research in Population and Public Health?
The School of Population and Public Health is, at its core, a quantitative field. Biostatistics and epidemiology are central, and that rigour is valuable. But it leaves little room for the theoretically grounded qualitative work my research requires. The CMS certificate gave me the interdisciplinary framework I was missing. Dr. Alexia Bloch‘s course on anthropology, mobility, and immobility gave me tools for thinking about migration as a structurally shaped experience rather than just movement. A course with Dr. Desirée Valadares pushed me to explore my own migration through my mother’s and grandmother’s experiences of mobility. And the scholars I have met through CMS have become an intellectual community I genuinely value.
What advice would you give to graduate students interested in pursuing community-engaged research in migration?
Start with your relationships, not your research questions. Community-engaged work requires trust that takes time to build, and that time cannot be rushed or substituted by a compelling research design. Be honest about your positionality: who you are, where you come from, and what you stand to gain matters to the communities you want to work with. Practitioner experience, whether as an interpreter, a frontline worker, or a designer, is not a detour from research. It is research. And learn to sit with complexity. Community-engaged work rarely produces clean answers. The goal is not resolution but understanding that is genuinely useful to the people whose lives it concerns, on their own terms.
Looking beyond your immediate research, what long-term contributions do you hope your work will make to scholarship, policy, and practice?
Success, for me, is not a destination. It looks like transgression: work that enables agency without replicating the systems it critiques. I think about the people doing invisible labour, the parents navigating two languages, two medical systems, and two sets of community expectations simultaneously, often without recognition or support. I want my work to produce tools that serve those people, not only scholarship that describes them. If the concepts I develop give families better language for their own experiences, if practitioners become more equipped to meet communities where they actually are, if the research opens space for self-determination, that is what success looks like. It is ongoing. It is multiple things at once.
