How the QB-IMMGS Started
Building bridges between the BSIA and Queen's University started with Kim and Reena sharing research interests, giving talks at one another's universities, particularly with the support of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Queen's University and Laurier's International Migration Research Centre, and laughing over several meals and good conversation.
Our idea for the Graduate Symposium similarly started small. The idea was to bring together a small group of students and faculty from both institutions with interests in migration, displacement and borders/(un)bordering. We wanted to provide a space for intellectual exchange, but in ways that resist the urge to follow the neoliberal competitive models of knowledge production and exchange that are increasingly forced upon us in the world of academe.
Instead, we started from the belief that the building of intellectual community through collaborative exchange, supporting new ideas, and creating space for nurturing one another's academic journeys is a good in and of itself. It is in this spirit that we are able to come together to delve into the difficult topics that this interdisciplinary area of research entails. Creating a supportive environment and space for learning and mentorship is a pathway to fostering longer term professional and personal friendships, networks and future partnerships between our universities and Symposium participants.
Objectives of the Symposium
The Symposium is designed to showcase graduate students’ work and promote their professionalization. Students from the BSIA and various departments at Queen’s University will have the opportunity to discuss and receive feedback on ongoing research. The Symposium enables graduate students to network amongst themselves as well as with an interdisciplinary group of faculty members from across the BSIA (which brings together graduate students and faculty from Wilfrid Laurier and Waterloo University) and Queen’s University, as well as invited guest faculty from other universities, all of whom work in the areas of international migration, mobilities, critical border and diaspora studies.
Furthermore, the Symposium fosters a long-term collaboration centred on migration studies between the BSIA and Queen’s University. As a yearly graduate workshop that alternates between the BSIA’s and Queen’s University’s campuses, this joint event allows for a sustained collaboration involving students and faculty members from both institutions.
As well, the Symposium seeks to provide an accessible and inclusive space where all students can feel welcomed and comfortable in sharing their work. Graduate students at different stages in their programs are welcome to participate in the Symposium on either a topic panel or in the roundtable discussion. The Symposium space encourages students to challenge normative frames on the topic of migration studies, question the status quo, and make space for marginalized voices.
Why Study Migration and Mobilites?
We are living in an age characterized by growing levels of migration and mobility for reasons ranging from displacement due to war, conflict, environmental degradation and poverty, to improving life opportunities, reunification with family and friends, work, travel and leisure, to name but a few. Yet, this is also a moment when, even as more people need and wish to move, others wish to stay and settle.
In both cases, borders and bordering impact (I'm)mobility of people. Scholars note the proliferation and diffusion of borders within the state, as borders become more localized, as well as externalized beyond the state. They also note the shift away from territorial borders between states to more remote digitalized forms of borders.
Border controls in response to mobility have only increased during the pandemic, compounded by processes of bordering along class, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion (to name a few), which are being fuelled by ideologies of hate and new social movements based on white supremacy, anti-immigration, religious extremism, homophobia, and misogyny. Such bordering is also compounded by histories of colonialism in settler societies.
Everyday bordering, as a horizontal bordering practice, is evidenced in everyday encounters between "citizens" and the "bordered migrant others". Simultaneously, solidarity alliances an resistances have also emerged from these groups to "un"border and decolonize- institutionally, individually, and through popular culture.
Our Funders
The QB-IMMGS is supported by the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, the Office of Research Services, and the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen's University.
