Visionary global educator, York U prof emerita given one of Canada’s highest honours

Retired Professor Wenona Giles who broke borders to bring higher education to refugees in Dadaab, Kenya, one of the world’s largest refugee camps, is recognized with Order of Canada    

“I am both delighted and astonished,” said Senior Scholar and retired Professor Wenona Giles at York University, after she was recently appointed as an Officer to the Order of Canada — a designation that recognizes achievement and merit of a high degree, especially service to Canada or to humanity at large.

This good news wouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who has known the internationally renowned social anthropologist as a changemaker. Or those familiar with Giles’s positive impact on humanity through her research in refugee migration studies and applying evidence-based solutions to social issues facing the world.

“Professor Giles sets a high bar on establishing and delivering on research partnerships that can evolve into global teaching engagements,” says Amir Asif, vice president research & innovation at York University. “Among the many great examples of her partnership initiatives, the ambitious Borderless Higher Education for Refugees project delivering university education for refugees in camps, stands out. I am grateful that she continues to be part of York University after retirement.”

Giles retired in 2018, more than three decades after teaching in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. Still associated with York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS), Giles is also actively engaged with the University’s Research Commons where she supports faculty applying for research and partnership grants.

As someone who studied, researched and co-authored with Giles, Professor Jennifer Hyndman adds, “Professor Giles tirelessly worked to forge partnerships with faculty at universities in the global South and Canada and NGOs in both Kenya and Canada, and fundraising with foundations and governments, before embarking on the pedagogy of delivering post-secondary curriculum to displaced people living in camps and the surrounding communities in which they lived. This honor recognizes this enormous and vital, but often invisible work.”

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Giles is truly a global scholar. Her scholarship is enriched by both lived experiences and through extensive research knowledge. Being drawn to social anthropology as a scholarly discipline came naturally to Giles, who has lived, studied and worked in Iran where she was born, and in the United Kingdom (her first citizenship), Canada (her second citizenship), France, Italy, the United States, Niger, and Burkina Faso.

“As an anthropologist, I thought I might be able to ask and possibly begin to answer questions about the poverty and other social inequalities that I had witnessed in Africa and the Middle East and the tenacious neo-colonial and unequal gender relations that persist to this day in international development, and in the politics of migration in Europe and Canada,” says Giles.

She sought to find answers to those pressing questions collaborating with researchers both here at York and on the ground elsewhere in the world. For example, she co-authored with Hyndman books that provide insight into the vulnerable status of refugees. Their joint research topics included the role gender plays in militarized conflict, from war zones to refugee camps, and across regions as diverse as Africa, Europe, Central America and South Asia, and how refugees across the globe live in conditions that extend from years to decades, without legal status that allows them to work and establish a home.

Giles also co-wrote Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER): Lessons from the Dadaab Refugee Camp with Laurie Miller (UBC), and counterparts in Kenya, Somalia, and the U.S., and NGO workers in and students from the camps, proving how global collaborations are possible and productive. The book was awarded the Jackie Kirk Award which recognizes literature committed to gender and education (particularly of girls and teachers) and/or education in conflict zones, and that works to identify, globalization as a context for local practice, and visual participatory research methodologies. The award funds, along with all book royalties, have been contributed to the support of university students in refugee camps in Kenya. 

The book published in late 2021 is based on BHER, the project that she launched and then co-led until her retirement in 2018, with education Professor Emeritus Don Dippo. The project was hosted by the CRS, which Giles and Dippo were part of, and Global Affairs Canada funded it to improve access to education for refugees where they live.

The aim of the project was to create equity in higher education, prepare local uncertified refugee teachers, improve teaching practices for better student achievement at elementary and secondary levels, and provide university degree programs in Dadaab – one of the world’s largest refugee settlement in Kenya. The project is a development partnership between York University; Kenyatta and Moi universities in Kenya; the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, University of British Columbia; and Windle International Kenya.  

Giles is a believer in life-long learning and continues to be affiliated to CRS. And as a life-long scholar and researcher, she is currently writing a historical novel, Pursued — دنبال. The story spans the early decades of the 20th century in England and Persia (Iran) and examines the unquenchable imperial thirst for what lay beneath the ground in southwest Persia – both oil and archaeological treasures – and how this  thirst threatened to destroy the lives of more than one of the novel's multigenerational characters.