Migration Conversations

Meet  filmmaker and artist Sook-Yin Lee,  graphic artist Chester Brown and experts Dr. Chris Bruckert and Dr. Ummni Khan. Following a screening of the film Paying For It, this panel discussed the book behind the film, and how how law circumscribes love, intimacy and our relationships. Sponsored by the Greenberg Chair for Women and the Legal Profession, this event took place in September 2025. 

Meet Ardi Imseis, law professor and lawyer who represented Palestine before the International Court of Justice in the Advisory Opinion on Israel's Illegal Presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Professor Imseis is also the author of The United Nations and the Question of Palestine. He talks about the advisory opinion and what it means for international law and how we can harness it for th...

Join this intimate conversation between Adelle Blackett, Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law at the Faculty of Law, McGill University and Canisia Lubrin, award winning poet and writer who teaches at the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA program. They talk about Canisia's debut fiction Code Noir and the enduring legacies of the colonial law that created the material conditions...

We speak with Reakash Walters as she provides an analytical toolkit for those who want to work with and not merely represent marginalized peoples and communities. She shares her research co-conducted with a former prisoner and how her friendship with him brings to light how Black friendship is criminalized in Canada. An important conversation about participatory law, and how lawyers can be part of...

We speak with four lawyers who intervene in the courts on behalf of community organizations. What is an intervention and why is it an important entry point for community organizations to converse with the courts. With Sandra Ka Hon Chu, Rosel Kim, Annamaria Enenajor and Naseem Mithoowani, we talk about four case studies they worked on, the importance of incremental change, and how the long game is...

Meet award winning writer, performance artist and community healer Kai Cheng Thom. She talks about how love can be a framework for transformative change and how even in the face of hate and denialism, compassion and love is what she has for everyone, even those that have none for her. We talk about her latest book, Falling in Love with Being Human, and how law students can use love in movement law...

Meet Justin Piché, co author of the book How to Abolish Prisons with Rachel Herzing. We talk about this book and how abolition is not just a theoretical concept but a practice and a possibility. Justin reveals his research with Rachel and how collective reconstruction to get rid of human cages is a viable movement despite the dark struggles around us.

In this episode, I speak with Petra Molnar about her new book The Walls Have Eyes where her research uncovers what technological experiments are taking place at various borders around the world on migrants as test subjects, and how the consequences of greater use and lack of oversight over tech use on people will shape our society in harmful ways. We discuss how such technology may reinforce and r...

Martin Luther King Jr once said that civil disobedience is not lawlessness but a higher form of lawfulness. In this episode, I speak with Faisal Bhabha, Irina Ceric and Paul Champ, lawyers and scholars intimate with protest and law. We talk about three case studies and what are appropriate legal limits to protest in a democratic society.

Meet immigration and refugee lawyer, Debbie Rachlis. We talk about the Gaza Special Measures Program, why nobody has been able to come through that program, and what it tells us about IRCC's ad hoc approaches to humanitarian crises.

Meet Douglas Chong, director of the Hawai'i Chinese History Centre. We talk about the long historical presence of Chinese in Hawai'i, how personal and community archives are essential to counter narratives produced by Western sources, and why it is important to remember the past.

Meet Esther Yoo, Director of the Refugee and Immigration Law Clinic at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai'i. We talk about how immigration and refugee law clients and issues are unique in Hawai'i and the kind of representation and challenges her clinic and students address. They provide services to unaccompanied children, migrant workers and asylum seekers through m...

Meet Dr. Nandita Sharma, author of Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants. Her provocative book interrogates the nation-state system and the anti-colonial and post-colonial aspiration to seek nationalized sovereignty through a terr=itorialized form - that sovereignty as territorial rule is the pinnacle of liberation for some communities. In this conversation, I...

Meet Dr. Kyle Kajihiro who teaches at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in Ethnic Studies and Geography and Environment. His research focuses on U.S. imperial formations, militarization, and Indigenous and decolonial social movements in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific region. He is also a founding member of Hawai'i Peace and Justice, an organization working to promote peace and social justice in Hawai'i...

Meet Dr. Kyle Kajihiro who teaches at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in Ethnic Studies and Geography and Environment. His research focuses on U.S. imperial formations, militarization, and Indigenous and decolonial social movements in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific region. He is also a founding member of Hawai'i Peace and Justice, an organization working to promote peace and social justice in Hawai'i...

In the 4th episode of the Hawai'i series of the Migration Conversations Podcast, I speak with Dr. John Rosa, and associate professor of history at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Dr. Rosa’s research focuses on the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Hawai’i and the histories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. He is the author of the acclaimed book Local...

In the third instalment of Migration Conversations' Hawai'i Series, I speak with Dr. Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, a professor in political science at the College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. His research focuses on the mobilization of rights discourses in various contexts. We discuss his new book Law by Night, nocturnal legal theory and how law is both present and absent from t...

Welcome to the second episode of a special series of Migration Conversations in Hawai'i. In this episode I am in conversation with Reece Jones, a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in the department of geography and environment. The author of four books in this episode, we talk about his book titled White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese E...

Welcome to the first episode of a special series of Migration Conversations in Hawai'i. In this episode I am in conversation with Noelani Goodyear-Ka’ōpua in an outdoor park with light rain tickling us. Born to young activists and UH graduates, Noelani grew up around Hawai’I communities and movements organizing around evictions, environmental degradation and economic injustice. Now a professor in...

This episode features the collective work of three scholars about their book, Containing Diversity: Canada and the Politics of Immigration in the 21st Century - an important teaching tool but also essential reading for those working and thinking about immigration policy. Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Ethel Tungohan, Christina Gabriel talk about care work as a methodology, the contradictions in our immigratio...

In this episode I speak with Gabriela Casineanu about the Immigrant Writers Association, how writing can be cathartic and an important way to share stories and perspectives of migrants. Check out their four anthologies of writing from various writers.

Meet Renisa Mawani, Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Across Oceans of Law published by Duke University Press. I speak with Renisa about her research tracing the currents and counter-currents of British / colonial law and Indian radicalism through the 1914 journey of the SS Komagata Maru.

Meet Heba Gowayed, an economic sociologist at Boston University. She is the author of "Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential". Her book follows the journeys of Syrians who sought refuge in Canada, Germany and the United States. Dr. Gowayed's insights in how states design refugee programs and how that affects people's resettlement experiences is illuminating.

Meet Jennifer Elrick, professor in the Department of Sociology at McGill University. Author of Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada, we talk about how bureaucrats in the federal government drove policy making in the area of immigration through their review of who is admissible to Canada in individual decision-making. A fascinating look at...

Meet Natalie Wee, a queer poet who writes about migration, borders, papers, and interrogates what it means to be a queer, racialized person in Canada. We talk about what it is like to live with precarious immigration status, and how writing is a source of comfort and advocacy.