Invisible no more: Migrant and refugee workers in Alberta's meatpacking industry face precarious conditions under COVID-19

What is the link between the immigration status of workers, the workplace conditions meat packers face and their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic? Why do meatpacking plants hire temporary foreign workers, recent immigrants, and former refugees as employees? What policy changes are needed to improve workplace safety of temporary foreign workers and newcomers?  These are

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Diaspora Geopolitics: Tamils in Canada

by Jennifer Hyndman, Amarnath Amarasingham, and Gayathri Naganathan When states focus on diasporas through a securitizing lens, they often frame diaspora political engagement in terms of violent nationalisms, extremism and threat. At times the Tamil diaspora in Canada (the largest Tamil diaspora in the world) has been depicted in this way, especially after the Canadian

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York University appoints a new associate vice-president research

Vice-President Research & Innovation Amir Asif announces the appointment of Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC) Professor Jennifer Hyndman as associate vice-president research (AVP), effective Jan. 1, 2021. Hyndman is former director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University where she is resident scholar. Prior to the inauguration of EUC, Hyndman was a professor in Liberal

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COVID-19 Among Meatpacking Workers: Documenting Migration Status and Employment Conditions in Southern Alberta

Project Investigator: Jennifer Hyndman. Partner: ActionDignity. Funding: SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant. Term: 2020-2022. The project seeks to unpack the links between the migration status of meat packers and their experience of COVID-19. Reports in the media and by community advocates, including partner organization, ActionDignity, indicate that the workforce is composed of almost entirely of migrant

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Probing Private Refugee Resettlement in Canada

Principal Investigator: Jennifer Hyndman Funding: SSHRC Insight Grant. Term: 2017-2022. The overall aim of the project is to produce and share new knowledge about private refugee sponsorship in Canada. Since March 2016, and at the September 2016 UN Summit in New York City on refugees and migrants, the federal government has committed to ‘exporting’ its

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Vaccine geopolitics during COVID-19

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus illustrates that we are connected globally like never before, yet responses to the virus are decidedly local and national, exposing new geopolitical fault lines and exacerbating material divides that make the difference between living and dying.   To put it bluntly, “we are simply not all in this

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