The (Un)Restricted Knowledge Speaker Series: Borders, Migration, and Belonging in America

 

US-based researchers have faced increasing restrictions on their ability to conduct and present research on the United States. The Trump administration has frozen, blocked, or cut billions of dollars in federal  grants that supported research in the social sciences, natural sciences, and the humanities. Several universities and their supporters have stated that this suspension of funding, along with other policies seeking to restrict DEI programs and student admission criteria, will restrict the scope and the nature of the research that they can conduct.

 

 

 

The Centre for the Study of the United States is launching “The (Un)Restricted Knowledge Speaker Series” to highlight the research conducted by CSUS affiliates and the larger community of scholars that study the United States at the University of Toronto on topics that have become increasingly difficult for U.S. based researchers to discuss.

 

 

 

The second panel of the series, “Borders, Migration, and Belonging in America,” features University of Toronto scholars Russell A. Kazal (Historical and Cultural Studies), Lisa Mar (History) and Emily Gilbert (Canadian Studies), who will examine how migration has shaped, and continues to reshape, Canada and the United States. Their work sheds light on the critical role of migration studies during a time when debates over immigration, border security, and national identity dominate headlines and the policy agenda. This event is a lunch talk, a light lunch will be provided.

 

 

 

 

Russell Kazal's research and teaching interests are in the social and (broadly defined) political history of the United States since 1877, with a focus on immigration, ethnicity and race, urban America, and ideologies of pluralism and nationalism. His current research project, "The Regional and Immigrant Roots of American Multiculturalism," examines the emergence of popular notions of ethnic pluralism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

 

 

 

 

 

Lisa Mar specializes in modern Canadian and U.S. immigration and ethnic history, especially the experiences of Asian Canadians and Asian Americans. Her research focuses on Chinese Canadians and Chinese Americans, their relations with their neighbours, and connections between global and local multicultural experiences in Canada. Mar is currently working on two book projects: an historical study of ethnic Chinese Confucianism in Canada and the United States during the 19th and 20th century, and a comparative history of Chinese in Canada and in the United States during the Second World War.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emily Gilbert’s research and writing examine how North American geopolitical relations are being reshaped through new security formations. Key topics addressed in her research include borders, security, citizenship, and sovereignty. Her recent work explores the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism, particularly in Western States.

 

 

 

Dr. Cynthia Cranford studies inequalities of gender, work and migration, and collective efforts to resist them. She has analyzed this nexus of inequalities and resistance through both in-depth, case studies of precarious migrant workers, like janitors in Los Angeles and temporary agency workers in Toronto, and analyses of insecure labour markets in Canada and the U.S. Her recent research compares the social organization of in-home personal care and support – the bodywork, emotion-work and housework that allows aging, chronically ill and disabled people to live at home – across different contexts.