CMS is excited to welcome four new visiting scholars, Dr. Güliz Taşdemir, Professor Ming Chen, Dr. Paolo Velásquez, and Nadya Zezyulina, for the 2025-26 academic year.
We look forward to the valuable contributions they will make during their time with us. Learn more about them and stay tuned for opportunities to engage with their work!
Dr. Güliz Taşdemir – Assistant Professor of Interior Architecture, TED University, Turkey
July 21 – August 15, 2025
Professor Ming Chen – Prof of Law, UC-San Francisco Law, Director, Center on Race, Immigration, Citizenship and Ethnicity (RICE)
August 30 – September 15, 2025 and November 19-28, 2025
Professor Chen is a legal scholar specializing in immigration, citizenship, and equality. She is Professor of Law and the founding faculty-director of the Center for Race, Immigration, Citizenship, and Equality (RICE) at UC Law San Francisco. Her teaching centers on Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Immigration Law, and Citizenship. In addition, she serves as Co-Editor for the Immigration Prof blog (@immprof) and chaired the executive committee for the AALS Immigration Section and the Law and Society Association’s Citizenship and Migration Section. She has served on the Colorado state advisory council to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Previously, she was a research associate at the Brookings Institution and worked for federal agencies and nonprofit organizations on the civil rights of racial minorities and immigrants.
Professor Chen’s current research investigates the legal and social dynamics affecting immigrants on temporary visas, such as high-skilled workers and international students, focusing on how their social construction as racially subordinate outsiders exacerbates the liminality of their legal status in the US and Canada.
Dr. Paolo Velásquez – Postdoctoral Research Fellow, COMPASS, Oxford
September 8 – October 3, 2025, with a return in spring 2026
Dr. Paolo Velásquez is a migration scholar with a broad social science background, primarily focused on understanding the causes and dynamics of prejudice, stigma, and integration. Their doctoral dissertation examined whether and how higher education reduces prejudice toward immigrants and ethnic minorities. As a postdoctoral researcher, they have conducted correspondence tests in the British labour market by sending identical CVs to employers while varying applicants’ names to signal different ethnic backgrounds. They also plan to carry out a survey in Sweden among individuals with and without a migration background to explore which qualifications are most valued in defining “successful integration.”
During their time at CMS, Dr. Velásquez will conduct a survey to explore what Canadians consider successful immigrant integration. This research will employ conjoint and vignette experiments, varying attributes of immigrant profiles—such as country of origin, education, and language proficiency—to better understand public perceptions of integration.
Nadya Zezyulina – Graduate Student Researcher, Political Science, Concordia
mid-January – mid-March in 2026
Nadezhda Zezyulina is a research assistant for the Migrant Integration in the Mid-21st Century: Bridging Divides project and a Master’s student at Concordia’s Institute for Research on Migration and Society (IRMS). Her thesis focuses on recent policies related to Foreign Credentials Recognition in British Columbia, a field that has seen a number of unique and noteworthy developments over the past decade.
As a part of her Master’s thesis, Nadezhda Zezyulina will interview several officials in the BC government on the subject of the recent policies regarding the Foreign Credentials recognition.
