CANCELLED - CRS Seminar: CRS Research Fellows
Due to the current strike at York University, this seminar has been cancelled and will be rescheduled for another time.
With guest speakers Bronwyn Bragg and Gamze Ovacık
Slaughterhouse geographies: Refugee labour in rural Canada
This paper considers the question of refugee integration from the perspective of former refugees who work in meatpacking, an industry where the work is dirty, difficult, and dangerous (3D). Resettled refugees make up less than three percent of the population of Alberta, Canada yet represent 18 percent of workers in the province’s meatpacking industry. This overrepresentation is especially stark when we consider that two of Canada’s largest meat processing facilities are located in semi-rural and remote communities in Southern Alberta. The paper argues that the precarity former refugee workers experience in meatpacking is produced spatially – by the rural and remote location of the plant where they work. We further argue that Canada’s refugee resettlement regime is a central protagonist in the production of a racialized, low-wage workforce in meatpacking. While former refugees are quickly incorporated in the labour market through work at the slaughterhouse, their position as workers in one of Canada’s most dangerous jobs, limits access to other forms of social participation and ‘integration’ into Canadian society.
Bronwyn Bragg is a CRS affiliate and former SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at York University. In May she will join the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Lethbridge as an assistant professor. Her first book, Making home in Little Syria, is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press. She is the Principal Investigator on a SSHRC-funded research project titled Slaughterhouse geographies: Comparing the integration experiences of refugee workers in Canadian meatpacking towns.
Safe Third Country Practices as a Tool for Containment of Human Mobility
The “safe third country” concept emerged in the global asylum governance scene in the late 1980s as an effort to prevent secondary movement of refugees, after they flee persecution and find safety at the closest instance possible. Despite being promoted as a responsibility-sharing tool by its proponents, in reality, safe third country practices aggravate the rights violations that refugees face and obstruct their access to asylum. This talk offers a comparative analysis of safe third country practices in the EU-Turkey and Canada-USA contexts, especially in consideration of the recent amendment of Canada-USA Safe Third Country Agreement in 2023. The comparison is based on dynamics surrounding the two asylum spaces and impacts of safe third country practices on mobility trajectories. Parallel efforts in the Global North demonstrate a common pattern in the global asylum regime towards reinforced containment of human mobility.
Gamze Ovacık is the Steinberg Postdoctoral Fellow on Migration Law at McGill University Faculty of Law and at the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, as well as an assistant professor at Başkent University Faculty of Law. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg within the ASILE Project on global asylum governance and the European Union’s role. She has been working with UNHCR, IOM and ICMPD Turkey offices on various projects. Her current research within the migration and asylum field focuses on safe third country practices, externalization policies, legal responsibility attribution and judicial practices.
