Located in the heart of Toronto—Canada’s most diverse city—the Munk School for Global Affairs and Public Policy hosts the Harney Program, a hub for innovative ideas and cutting-edge research related to issues of citizenship, migration, and diversity.
These issues shape the focus of the Program’s vibrant intellectual community. Here we grapple with some of the most challenging questions of our time—questions that are often entirely novel ones or require critical reflection in a world of fast-evolving technology, migration, and communications. These questions include how to live together in our increasingly diverse societies; the relationship between mobility and inequality; the surge of biometric borders and new technologies of migration control; disruptions to existing forms of membership and belonging, and the bearing of such disruptions on citizenship and migration. Other topics addressed in the Program are selective admission policies; dilemmas of collective identity and the rise of populist nationalism; and the elastic boundaries of multicultural accommodation and their impact on religious, ethnic, sexual, and racial minorities.
Fostering excellence in research and teaching is central to our Program’s mission. It is the underpinning principle of the Graduate Collaborative Specialization in Ethnic, immigration and Pluralism Studies; faculty and graduate students from 15 participating units come together, drawing on the richness and rigor of academic inquiry at the University of Toronto. As the Director of the Harney Program, I encourage members of our multi-disciplinary community to think deep and hard about how to overcome histories and narratives of inclusion and exclusion that reinforce contemporary frameworks of citizenship, migration, and diversity. The Specialization offers a unique venue for graduate students to consider these themes, both locally and globally, through a plurality of perspectives in the social sciences, law, and humanities. I invite you to consult our website for further information about our Specialization.
Our dedication to promoting catalyst conversations is reflected in the key venues and forums organized by the Harney Program. These include the flagship Harney Lecture Series, which invites world-leading scholars to share fresh empirical and theoretical insights. The newly launched Harney Graduate Network fosters breakthrough discussion through work-in-progress sessions, reading groups, and related community-building scholarly activities. The Network serves as a gravitational field for faculty and students across the university to explore shared areas of interest. The Harney Fellowship offers advanced graduate students conducting research in areas related to citizenship, migration, and diversity the opportunity to become Fellows of the Harney Program; this enables them to participate fully in our community’s academic life. Beyond promoting rigorous conversations, these events also contribute to public debates about issues relevant to the Program.
Join us for upcoming events and explore our website to learn more about the Program. You can also follow us on our new Facebook and Twitter accounts! If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at harneyprogram@utoronto.ca
We look forward to welcoming you to our lively intellectual community.
Ayelet Shachar