Border Studies Research Group
Meet our research group
Paul McKenzie-Jones, whose research focuses on transborder Indigenous activism in the 20th and 21st centuries
Sheila McManus, who has published extensively on the Canada-U.S. and U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the 19th and 20th centuries
Julie Young, Canada Research Chair in Critical Border Studies, whose research focuses on how refugees, migrants, and advocates in communities around the Canada-US and Mexico-Guatemala borders interact with and challenge those borders.
Border Studies Research Group Conferences
The Line Crossed Us 2025: New Directions in Critical Border Studies
Building on the success of our 2019, 2021, and 2023 conferences, the Lethbridge Border Studies Research Group invites you to participate in our fourth biannual conference, Thursday, June 12 – Friday, June 13. The University of Lethbridge sits in the heart of Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy) territory, where the Hudson’s Bay and Missouri River watersheds divide, 100 km north of the Canada-U.S. border. Registration is now open! Learn more and register on Eventbrite before the end of May. The conference is entirely online, and we will send the online access information to registrants in June.
Plenary speaker: Dr. Petra Molnar, Associate Director, Refugee Law Lab, York University
Petra Molnar is a lawyer and an anthropologist working at the intersection of migration and technologies. She has worked all over the world, including Greece, US-Mexico, Canada, Kenya, and Palestine. She co-runs the Refugee Law Lab at York University and is a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Her first book, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, was a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Nonfiction Literary Award.
Program
Please note that all sessions are MDT and will be on Zoom. Register here before the end of May, and we will send the online login information in June. View the program below or click the button for a printable version.
8:30-9:00 Welcome!
Opening remarks: Sheila McManus.
Blessing: Francis First Charger, Ninnaisipistoo (Owl Chief)
9:00-10:15 Panel 1 The northern edges of the Indian subcontinent
Chair: Angela Brooks, M.A. (Music), University of Lethbridge
Dr. Arjun Chapagain, PhD in Public and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong. “Impact of COVID-19 on the Nepal-Tibet Border: Disrupting Trade, Tourism, and Cultural Exchange.”
Tsering Dawa, PhD candidate in Chinese Studies at the School of International Studies, Centre for East Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Trans-Himalayan Relevance and Resistance: Geopolitical Dynamics and Local Impacts Along the Sino-Indian Border in Ladakh.”
Dr. Neha Meena, Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. “Negotiations of Migration and Citizenship Practices: Analyzing lived experiences of Pakistani Hindu migrants in western Rajasthan.”
10:15-10:30: Break
10:30-12:00 Keynote Address Petra Molnar, Associate Director, Refugee Law Lab, York University. “The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”
12:00-1:00: Lunch Break
1:00-2:15: Panel 2 Migrating through a hostile world
Chair: A K M Iftekhar Khalid, PhD Candidate in Cultural Social and Political Thought (English), and Research Assistant in the Humanities Innovation Lab, University of Lethbridge
Jessica Chandrashekar, immigration detention staff lawyer and PhD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, Tkaronto. “Living a bordered life: migration control and carcerality in the community.”
Emmanuel Desbordes, PhD candidate in the Population Studies and Health, University of Lethbridge, and Dr. Peter Kellett, RN., Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Lethbridge. “Precarious Migration Status as a Social Determinant of Health: African Immigrants Living with Precarious Migration Status in Southern Alberta”
Dr. Tyler Correia, School of Culture, Media and Society at the University of the Fraser Valley. “Theorizing the Cosmopolitan Public Sphere in the Coming Age of Border Enforcement."
2:15-2:30: Break
2:30-3:30: Panel 3 Kaleidoscopic Identities, Reveries and Warriors: Indigenous Gender, Queerness, and Masculinity within Virtual Imaginaries of Southern Alberta Borderlands
Chair: Yvonne Tiger, PhD Candidate in Cultural Social and Political Thought, University of Lethbridge, and Assistant Professor, MacEwan University
Blair Many Fingers (Researcher in Residence), Kaiya Healy (Research Intern), Dr. Migueltzinta C. Solís (Adjunct Professor, University of Lethbridge; Director, CIART Lab), Nayan Velaskar (Artist Researcher), and Walker English (Artist in Residence). Centre for Indigenous Art, Research and Technology (CIART Lab), Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lethbridge.
8:30-9:30: Panel 4 When the border is a river
Chair: Brendan Cummins, PhD candidate in Cultural Social and Political Thought, and Instructor in the School of Liberal Education, University of Lethbridge
Ritapriya Nandy, PhD candidate at the Center for Regional Studies, University of Hyderabad. “Between Land and Water: Territoriality and Char Realities at the India-Bangladesh Border.”
0930-0945: Break
09:45-11 Panel 5 Refugees and asylum seekers
Chair: Janelle Marietta, PhD candidate in Cultural Social and Political Thought, and Instructor in the Dhillon School of Business, University of Lethbridge
Dr Bernard Sama Nde, Chair of the Asylum Seekers Support Trust. “Addressing Psychological and Mental Health Harms in New Zealand RSD (refugee and protection status determination) System: Therapeutic Jurisprudence Perspective.”
Bushra Ali Khan, Guest Member at the Women in Refugee Law think tank at the University of Sussex and a Research Fellow supported by the Asia Foundation and IMPRI. “Genocide Denial as Soft Power: ASEAN’s Stance on the Rohingya Crisis.”
Mirco Stella, PhD candidate in Education and Graduate Research Fellow at the Center for Refugee Studies, York University. "On borders in borderless education: Challenges and reflections emerging from the authentication of conferred Canadian University degrees abroad."
Harini Sivalingam, Equality Program Director at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and PhD candidate at York University, and Aaden Pearson, Trans Rights Legal Fellow at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “Challenges for Trans Asylum Seekers in an Era of Anti-Trans Hostility.”
11:00 – 11:15 Break
11:15 – 12:30 Panel 6 Culture(s) as resistance
Chair: Rebeca Spencer, MA (Anthropology) University of Lethbridge
Melike Seker, Research Assistant (PhD, Department of Sociology, Munzur University. “The Effect of Capital Accumulation Process on the Formation of Ethnic Groups: Kurds in the Border Region between Türkiye and Iran."
Usman Muhammad, PhD candidate, University of Heidelberg. “Wagah Border: A Symbolic Dance of Ambivalence.”
Amy Cran, MA student in Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University. “Build Kinships, not Fences: Rejecting a Bare Life in Alberta’s Recovery Turn.”
Ana Sandoval, PhD candidate at Rutgers-Newark. “Concepts from the Margins: Reimagining Governance and Belonging Through Border Children’s Lived Experiences.”
12:30-1: Lunch Break
1:00-2:15 Panel 7 Securitization and militarization
Chair: Janelle Marietta, PhD candidate in Cultural Social and Political Thought, and Instructor in the Dhillon School of Business, University of Lethbridge
Lio Ando-Bourget, PhD candidate in Geography at the Université Paris-Cité. “Coloniality and humanitarianism in the Sonoran Desert militarised borderlands.”
Kyla Simone Piccin, PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Cambridge. “Securing the Woods at Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek: An Analysis of Carceral Power at the Frontiers of BC Forestry.”
Rahul Balasundaram, MA in Immigration and Settlement Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University. “Climate Coloniality, Border Securitization and Climate Justice: A Critique of Canada’s Approach to Global Climate Displacement.”
Dr. Maira E. Alvarez, Adjunct Professor, Department of History, St. Mary’s University. “Fronteriza Narratives: Documenting the Militarization of US/Mexico Border[lands].”
2:15-2:30: Break
2:30-3:00: Panel 8 Pamela Dodds, Independent Visual Artist, Toronto. “Documenting Border Barriers: An Artist's Approach”
Chair: Darcy Tamayose, PhD candidate in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (History), University of Lethbridge.
3:00-4:00 Book Launch roundtable for Challenging Borders, Contingencies and Consequences. This anthology came out of our first 2019 border studies conference, and the roundtable will feature authors Marilyn James and Lori Barkley, Ramon Resendiz, and Claudia Donoso as well as the three co-editors.
4:00-4:30 Closing Remarks: Paul McKenzie Jones
Download the Program Register Here
For more information, don't hesitate to get in touch with us at borderstudies@uleth.ca.
Past Conferences
We hosted our first conference at the U of L June 13-15, 2019. Dorothy First Rider and Annabel Crop Eared Wolf presented the opening plenary on “The Impacts of the Canada-US Border on the Blackfoot Confederacy,” and Dr. Anne McNevin from The New School delivered the keynote address, “Time, Sanctuary, and Decoloniality: Notes from Manus Island Prison.” There was a free film screening and public reception at the Lethbridge Multicultural Centre of El Muro/The Wall, a collaborative documentary/film co-directed by Ramon Resendiz and Rosalva Resendiz, and an artists’ exhibition and talk by Heather Parrish and Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, called “Artist Exhibit: Working the Border: Materializing Exploration, Exclusion, and Entanglement in Encounters with Boundaries.” Our forthcoming anthology from Athabasca University Press features several of the 22 papers presented during this conference.
We hosted our second conference June 10-11 2021, and moving it online meant that we were able to include a much wider range of scholars and activists. The program jumped to 14 panels with more than 60 presenters from around the world. Dr. Benjamin Hoy from the University of Saskatchewan, gave the keynote, “A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands,” and we hosted a public webinar focused on “Creative Defiance in the US-Mexico Borderlands.” We scheduled short Zoom “lobbies” throughout the program so that participants from different continents and time zones could hang out and chat between sessions. Several papers from this conference are featured in our forthcoming special edition of Studies in Social Justice.
Our third conference was June 8-9, 2023, online again to support more of the global conversations we had enjoyed so much in 2021. Dr Dr. Idil Atak, Toronto Metropolitan University, gave the keynote address, “Bordering Migration and the Rights of Forced Migrants in Canada.” We hosted a free public screening of the film “Beyond Extinction,” directed b award-winning director Ali Kazimi and followed by a conversation with Kazimi and Smum iem Matriarch Marilyn James. The program included 11 panels with nearly 40 presenters from around the world, and more Zoom “lobbies” with worldwide, multi-time zone conversations!
News & Updates
Challenging Borders Launches to Strong Early Reviews
Our anthology Challenging Borders has just been published by Athabasca University Press, and has already received a great review from Calgary writer Ximena Gonzalez.
- Studies in Social Justice
Special issue featuring articles from our 2021 conference, set to be published in 2025.
- Public Professor Talk: "Borders are Stupid"
- Speaker: Sheila McManus
- Date: November 23, 2023
- Panel Discussion on Bordering Migration
- Event: "Historical, Legal, and Social Dimensions and Realities of the Border Regimes in North America"
- Date: March 20, 2023
- Location: Toronto Metropolitan University
- Participants: All three members of the LBSG (Paul McKenzie-Jones, Sheila McManus and Julie Young)
- Book Launch: Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West
- Speaker: Sheila McManus
- Date: December 2, 2022
- Publisher: Texas A&M Press
- Event Type: Book launch and panel discussion
- Virtual Panel: "Border Blues: The Negative Impacts of the Covid-19 Border Closure"
- Panelist: Paul McKenzie-Jones
- Date: November 9, 2021
- Organizer: Carleton University's Centre for Security, Intelligence, and Defence Studies
- Anthology: Challenging Borders: Contingencies and Consequences
- An anthology of papers from our 2019 conference, published by Athabasca University Press in 2025.
- Article: "Counter-Archive as Methodology: Activating Oral Histories of the Contested Canada-US Border."
- Authors: Johanna Reynolds, Grace Wu, and Julie E. E. Young
- Journal: ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 22:4 (2023)
- Read the article here.
- Article: "Access to Early Childhood Services by Precarious Status Families: Negotiating Multiple Borders in a Sanctuary City, Toronto Canada."
- Authors: Judith K. Bernhard, Julie E.E. Young, and Luin Goldring
- Institution: Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Immigration and Settlement
- Access the paper here.
- Book Chapter: Gunless as Settler Colonial Borderlands Fantasy
- Author: Sheila McManus
- In: Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film
- Editors: Janne Lahti and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
- Publisher: Routledge, 2020
- Order the book here.
PUBlic Professor Series: Dr. Sheila McManus
This talk explores why we believe the lies borders tell us, and why we shouldn’t.