Principal Investigator and Co-Applicants

Susan McGrath, the Project Director, is Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies, Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at York University, member of the Governance Board of the Ontario Metropolis CERIS and Vice-President of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration. McGrath’s research includes two SSHRC funded projects focusing on issues of settlement and collective trauma and two international research projects. She is a member of the editorial board of Refuge and formerly co-editor of the Canadian Review of Social Policy.

Wenona Giles, an anthropologist, is Deputy Director of CRS and Professor in the School of Social Sciences at York University, where she teaches and publishes in the areas of gender, migration, ethnicity, nationalism, and war. Her many articles and books include Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones published with co-editor and co-applicant Hyndman (University of California Press, 2004). She co-coordinated the international Women in Conflict Zones Research Network from 1996-2004 (with collaborator, Korac) and from 2007 onwards (with new scholar, Crosby). Her current SSHRC-funded research (with Hyndman) on protracted refugee situations focuses on Somali refugees in Kenya and Afghan refugees in Iran.

Sharryn Aiken is past President of the Canadian Council for Refugees, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University and Editor-in-Chief of Refuge. She is recipient of a 2007 SSHRC funded Strategic Grant: Refugee Diasporas,“Homeland” Conflicts and the Impact of the Post-9/11 Security Paradigm. Aiken is co-author of Immigration and Refugee Law: Cases, Materials and Commentary (Emond Montgomery, 2006).

Michael Barutciski is Associate Professor of International Affairs at York’s bilingual Glendon College. He worked for several years at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre and directed the diplomacy program at the University of Canterbury prior to arriving at York. His publications have been cited in leading law and international relations journals, as well as periodicals in geography and anthropology.

Nergis Canefe is Associate Professor of Political Science at York University, and Associate Director at the Centre for Refugee Studies. Her areas of interest are minority rights, diaspora politics, transnational politics of religion, critical citizenship studies, and crimes against humanity. She has recently published a co-edited volume Turkey and the European Integration (Routledge 2004) and a sole-authored volume in Turkish entitled Citizenship, Identity and Belonging: Limits of Turkish Nationalism (Bilgi University, 2006). Her new edited volume with William Safran entitled The Jewish Diaspora as a Paradigm: Politics, Religion and Belonging (Edwin Mellen Press) is forthcoming in 2008.

Rudhramoorthy Cheran is Assistant Professor in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Windsor. He is also a senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), Colombo, Sri Lanka. He is currently the principal Investigator of an IDRC funded major research project on Sri Lankan Diasporas and their global Engagement. His latest publication is a co-edited volume: History and Imagination: Tamil Culture in the Global Context, Toronto:TSAR Publications, 2007.

François Crépeau holds the Canada Research Chair in International Migration Law, Université de Montréal. His current research focuses on migration controls, international cooperation aimed at reducing irregular migration, new security concepts relating to migration, and the erosion of the rights and freedoms of migrants in the post-9/11 era. A leading expert in international refugee and migration law and international human rights law, he has been the Director of the Revue québécoise de droit international (1996-2004) and heads the Mondialisation et droit international collection of Éditions Bruylant (Brussels).

Donald Galloway is Professor of Law at the University of Victoria, specializing in Immigration Law, Refugee Law and Citizenship Law. He has authored several articles on legal theory, focusing on the rights of non-citizens, web-based materials on immigration enforcement and two books (one as co-author) on immigration and refugee law. He served as a member of the Refugee Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board from 1998-2001. He is Chair of the executive committee of the new Canadian Association for the Study of Forced Migration.

Jennifer Hyndman is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University (on leave at Syracuse University in 2007-08). Her research spans the continuum of forced migration, from conflict zones and refugee camps to refugee resettlement in North America, and embodies a feminist approach attentive to displacement, mobility, and subjectivity broadly speaking. She is the author of Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Gerald Kernerman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at York University and former Associate Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies. His current research analyzes the framing and justification of refugee interdiction or blocking practices by liberal democratic states in light of their commitments to human rights and the rule of law. He is the author of Multicultural Nationalism: Civilizing Difference, Constituting Community (UBC Press, 2005).

James Milner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Carleton University. He has been a researcher, practitioner and policy advisor on issues relating to refugees, peacebuilding, African politics and the United Nations system. Before joining Carleton, he was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. Since 2003, he has also been Co-Director of The PRS Project: Towards Solutions for Protracted Refugee Situations, an international research project at the University of Oxford focusing on the plight of refugees in situations of prolonged exile in Africa and Asia (http://www.prsproject.org). In recent years, he has undertaken field research in Kenya, Tanzania, Guinea, Thailand and India, and has presented research findings to stakeholders in New York, Geneva, London, Ottawa, Bangkok, Nairobi and elsewhere. He has worked as a Consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in India, Cameroon, Guinea and its Geneva Headquarters. He is author of Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), co-author of UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection into the 21st Century (Routledge, 2008), and co-editor of Protracted Refugee Situations: Political, Human Rights and Security Implications (UN University Press, forthcoming). His doctorate is from the University of Oxford, where he worked on the politics of asylum in Africa.