This year’s Speaker Series will focus on the theme:
Refuge and Resistance: Navigating Between Protection and Exclusion.
Across Canada and around the world, migration and asylum policies are increasingly defined by border enforcement, securitization, and more restrictive approaches to protection. At the same time, millions of people are being displaced by violence, economic hardship, and climate change, crossing borders in search of safety and better lives. The tension between exclusion and protection raises urgent questions: Who can access safety? How are refuge and humanitarian protection defined? What futures are possible for people forced to move?
The 2026-27 CMS Speaker Series explores refuge, borders and resistance at a time of growing displacement and political uncertainty. The series will examine how borders are being hardened and enforced, how migrants and refugees experience and navigate these systems, and how communities, advocates, and policymakers are responding.
These hybrid events will feature in-person speakers and will be held at UBC Vancouver. Lunch will be served.
Save the dates!
-
Monday, September 21, 2026, 11:45 AM – 1:45 PM
Humanitarian Fictions: Narrative, Power, and the Politics of Refugee Reception
Dr. Rawan Arar, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Washington
Rawan Arar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California San Diego and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Her scholarship on refugees, migration, and the politics of displacement has appeared in Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Middle East Law and Governance, Nations and Nationalism, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Contexts, and Journal of Refugee Studies, among others. She is the co-author, with David Scott FitzGerald, of The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach and co-editor of Refugee Resettlement as an Institution.
-
Monday, November 23, 2026, 11:45 AM – 1:45 PM
Transnational Labour, Multinational Capital, and Constructive Humanitarianism on the Canadian Prairies: The Case of Meat
Dr. Jennifer Hyndman, Professor of Geography in Environmental and Urban Change and Resident Scholar, York University
Jennifer Hyndman is Professor of Geography in Environmental and Urban Change and Resident Scholar at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University. For more than three decades, she has worked on questions of displacement, war, security (both human and state), migration and work. Her ethnography of UNHCR and research in war zones (Somalia, Sri Lanka) and refugee camps (Kenya) are the basis of four books. With a longstanding critical interest in the im/migration policy space in Canada, her current collaborative research focuses on the survival jobs that recently arrived refugees and temporary migrants take in Western Canada.
-
Monday, February 1, 2027, 11:45 AM – 1:45 PM
Dr. Linda Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of South Alabama
Linda E. Sanchez is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Alabama. Her research focuses on better understanding undocumented people in the U.S., their responses to government immigration policy, and how these policies affect everyday life, access to resources, identity, and decision-making. This work highlights how policy can often exclude the very people it is meant to benefit through strict requirements, expensive fees, and unrealistically long wait times. Working with communities in California and the Deep South, her most recent research compares how liberal and conservative politics affect immigrant experiences.
Stay tuned as we announce the fourth speaker and confirm the date!
