Alison Mountz, the 2009-2010 William Lyon Mackenzie King Research Fellow with the Canada Program at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, will present “The Enforcement Archipelago: Haunting and Asylum on Islands” tomorrow. Her talk is part of York's Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS) and Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration & Settlement (CERIS) 2009-2010 Autumn Seminar Series.
Mountz is visiting Harvard from Syracuse University, where she is a geography professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs. Her research examines transnational migration and border governance and has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Canadian Embassy.
Left: Alison Mountz
Her forthcoming book, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (University of Minnesota Press), will explore encounters between authorities and undocumented migrants. Mountz was recently awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Grant from the National Science Foundation to support her study of island detention centres where asylum-seekers have been held off the shores of North America, Europe and Australia.
She has garnered awards for her undergraduate and graduate teaching and is currently teaching courses on the Canada-US border and political geography.
The CRS-CERIS 2009-2010 Autumn Seminar Series continues on Wednesday, Nov. 18, when York sociology Professor Luin Goldring will present “Persistent Precarity: The Long-term Impacts of Precarious Status and Work”. Then on Wednesday, Dec. 2, Yale University anthropology Professor Kamari Maxine Clarke will present her talk, “Fictions of Justice: The ICC and Classifying Criminal Responsibility”.
All three seminars will take place from 12:30 to 2pm, in the fifth floor conference room of the York Research Tower, Keele campus.
For more information, contact Oz Ziv at ozzyziv@yorku.ca or visit the CERIS Web site.