Jennifer Hyndman

York University · Departments of Social Science and Geography

The new research report, Sustaining Welcome: Longitudinal Research on Integration with Resettled Syrian Refugees, interviewed over 200 resettled Syrian refugees each year between 2017 and 2020 to track changes in their integration experiences over time. Through this interview-based approach, the report offers one of the most detailed assessment of...

Scholarship in the field of Refugee Studies has rightly been criticised for being theoretically anaemic, overly empirical, and at times Orientalist, casting the refugee as ‘Other’ or as an object of enquiry. And yet for more than three decades, the field has been critical, infused with studies of power relations, social theory, and Global South cri...

Most immigrants to Canada who are not refugees contribute to decisions about where they settle; resettled refugees do not. This paper illustrates how one's designated category of resettlement decisively shapes the place one begins life in Canada, and how each has a specific geographical trajectory—or geo-script. The geo-scripts are distinct for eac...

For more than 40 years, groups of Canadian residents have raised funds and offered their time and energy to support over 325,000 refugee newcomers to Canada through the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program. In 2020, targets for private refugee sponsorship in the Canadian context were double the number of government-assisted refugees. Private spo...

There is little longitudinal research that directly compares the effectiveness of Canada's Government-Assisted Refugee (GAR) and Privately Sponsored Refugee (PSR) Programs that takes into account possible socio-demographic differences between them. This article reports findings from 1,921 newly arrived adult Syrian refugees in British Columbia, Ont...

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out...

The management of migration and displacement, including humanitarian response, is shaped by geopolitics and relies on the construction of two key spatialities of exclusion, containment, and securitization: externalizing asylum and refuge so that those on the move are kept in "regions of origin" away from the "Global North;" and encampment within th...

There is little longitudinal research that directly compares the effectiveness of Canada’s Government-Assisted Refugee (GAR) and Privately Sponsored Refugee (PSR) Programs that takes into account possible socio-demographic differ-ences between them. This article reports findings from 1,921 newly arrived adult Syrian refugees in British Columbia, On...

Abstract: Multiculturalism is a contested concept and policy in the current context. Many European leaders have declared its failure, and scholars have traced a global backlash against multicultural policies, especially in Europe. Canadians, on the other hand, are more likely to view it positively, as a badge of citizenship or belonging. Being mul...

The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditi...

The military conflict in Sri Lanka may be over officially, but conflict continues as a ‘war without sound’ (community informant, Mullaitivu 2013), or as war by other means (Dahlman 2011). In the absence of peace and reconciliation, but the presence of economic growth, development by stealth proceeds. Much has been written about the militarisation o...

The Sri Lankan state's power to narrate the war and characterize the enemy is an expression of “triumphalist nationalism” and is a selective remembering of war. Based on photographs taken during several field visits to these sites by both authors between December 2012 and January 2014, we analyze the relationship of war and tourism and how a partic...

This paper addresses the gap in research on the social dimensions of refugee resettlement. This is accomplished by examining refugee belonging and definitions of "integration" through a case study of Acehnese refugees resettled in Vancouver, British Columbia, between 2004 and 2006. We analyze findings based on a survey and in-depth interviews condu...

Liberal democratic norms are embodied in refugee camps and the states that host them in a multitude of ways: through refugee law and the 'good offices' of the United Nations; in relation to international aid and the prerequisites recipient governments must meet to receive it; and in refugee education to name but a few. In the Dadaab camps of Northe...

Millions of refugees are stuck in camps and cities of the global South without permanent legal status. They wait in limbo, their status unresolved in what the United Nations (UN) calls ‘protracted refugee situations’ (PRS). The material conditions and depictions of such refugees as immobile and passive contributes to a feminization of asylum in suc...

Executive Summary This paper represents an overview and meta-analysis of existing research on refugee integration in Canada. The terms of reference for the work include three main components: 1) a summary of key research findings in sectors indicative of integration in Canada, such as labour force participation and income, housing careers, official...

The interdisciplinary field of refugee studies includes gender analyses, but feminism is not its forte. Scholarship in the field has neglected the development of feminist frameworks to trace the power relations that shape the gender and other politics of forced migration. Specifically, the underplayed concept of ‘refugee transnationalism’ is elabor...

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. Th...

Team research enables the collection of multiple, sometimes conflicting, stories of migration, family, and belonging. Using common qualitative methods within a team research context can stretch these research techniques in productive and instructive ways and proffer new insight and meaning.Therefore, the authors suggest that team research offers an...

In August 2005, after the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean Basin, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the cessation of hostilities was signed by Aceh's longstanding adversaries-the Government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). The tsunami was a major catalyst for 'disaster diplomacy'-international political pressure, which, t...

This article mobilizes a feminist analytic to examine team research and collaborative knowledge production. We center our encounter with team research - a collectivity we named ‘Team Ismaili’ - and our study with first- and second-generation East African Shia Ismaili Muslim immigrants in Greater Vancouver, Canada. We draw upon feminist politics to...

International aid is a dynamic bundle of geographical relationships at the intersection of war, neoliberalism, nature, and fear. The nexus between development and security warrants further conceptualization and empirical grounding beyond the instrumentalist and alarmist discourses that underwrite foreign aid. This article examines two such discours...

The article aims to analyse two policy narratives that were politicised in the context of post-tsunami response in Eastern Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia. These areas had been affected by war for several decades before the tsunami hit. The first narrative of public safety saw government imposition of post-tsunami buffer zones, ostensibly as measures...

Insecurity and fear in the global North produce political space to advance security measures, including the externalization of asylum. States in the global North make it increasingly difficult for asylum seekers to reach sovereign territory where they might make a refugee claim. While legal protection remains intact under the Refugee Convention, ex...

Social relations, including gender, are destabilized by conflict and disaster. Approaches informed by feminist thought illustrate this by probing the ways in which different identities and locations produce inequality, violence and disparate power relations. In this article, a feminist approach to development and disasters is advocated. In Sri Lank...

This chapter explores the scales and sites at which war is waged and the ways in which security is being reconfigured in relation to citizenship and sovereignty. Human security is probed as a concept related to a form of global citizenship. It focuses on ‗freedom from fear' for civilians at finer scales than nation-state, rather than on conventiona...

Two StoriesAmerican Manhood Ideals and the Frontier MythTerrorism and the Logic of the Showdown“:Punitive” ExpeditionsInfinite Justice and Violation at Different ScalesConclusion

Fear is a potent political resource that is at once an expression of vulnerability to geopolitical threats and a rationale for security measures against them. It is produced through tropes of nationalism rooted in economic marginalization, loss of territory, and anxieties about invasions of home. Such anxieties give rise to the securitization of fe...

Feminist geography and political geography still represent two solitudes within the discipline. While increased traffic between these different parts of the discipline points to a degree of intellectual engagement, there remains a paucity of feminist thought in political geography. This article examines recent scholarship on feminist political geog...

Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver have attracted most new immigrants to Canada. Small and medium-sized cities in Canada are keen to share the wealth that new immigrants represent, and federal and provincial governments support a more even distribution of settlement. As a result, the idea of attracting new immigrants to smaller locations is a pressin...

In 1999, 905 Kosovar refugees settled in the province of British Columbia (BC) in Canada. Despite their sudden and forced departure, many have maintained contact with and returned to visit Kosovo/a. We contend that these transnational links are different for refugees than for other classes of immigrants. In this case, "refugee transna- tionalism" r...

In Canada, the phenomenon of urban refugees is largely an expression of state-managed practices, not spontaneous migration and settlement. This study focuses on the distinctly North American, and specifically Canadian, experiences of pre-meditated, state-planned, government-managed migration and settlement for urban refugees from the Aceh region of...

While homelessness is a growing problem in Greater Vancouver, immigrants are not yet a visible part of the region’s homeless. The over-representation of immigrants among the population considered at-risk suggests that immigrant homelessness remains hidden. Using census-based housing indicators, we examine the geographies of immigrants at-risk of ho...

There are a number of socioeconomic phenomena that are difficult to discern using only census data. We present an innovative approach developed to discern the spatial dimensions of risk for homelessness amongst recent immigrants in Vancouver, Canada. Dasymetric mapping and a postal survey are employed to improve the resolution and utility of census...

In Sri Lanka, gender and national identities intersect to shape people's mobility and security in the context of conflict. This article aims to illustrate the gendered processes of identity construction in the context of competing militarised nationalisms. We contend that a feminist approach is crucial, and that gender analysis alone is insufficien...

In conflict zones from Iraq and Afghanistan to Guatemala and Somalia, the rules of war are changing dramatically. Distinctions between battlefield and home, soldier and civilian, state security and domestic security are breaking down. In this especially timely book, a powerful group of international authors doing feminist research brings the highly...

This chapter presents a reflection on feminist politics in the context of militarized violence. It specifically explores the gender implications of globalization, human security, and human rights. It argues that it is crucial to identify the gendered antecedents and consequences of violence, conflict, and war. Processes of globalization do not occu...

This book forges connections between militarized violence that occurs before, during, after, and even in the absence of war. It also presents original research illustrating feminist analyses grounded in particular conflict zones. The gendered impact of nationalism and the role of the nation in shaping women's identities, status, and actions are the...

The intersections and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few. Feminist geographers’ forays into geopolitics and international relations within political geography have been relatively rare compared to their presence and influence in social, cultural, and economic geography. Likewise, only a few p...

This paper aims to disentangle patterns of aid, trade, conflict and migration between Canada and Sri Lanka, illustrating the surprisingly significant traffic between the two countries and exploring the significance and quality of these connections. International aid to Sri Lanka is closely related to the opening of markets to multinational investme...

Some safe havens and protected areas are safer than others for internally displaced persons situated in war zones. The research presented compares three such areas: the 'safe cities' of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a UN-sanctioned 'preventive zone' in Southern Somalia, and an 'open relief centre' in Northern Sri Lanka. Each of these safe spaces has distinct...

Feminist geopolitics' offers a critical framework for analyzing the events and aftermath of September 11th. This grid of intelligibility seeks to provide a more accountable, embodied understanding of intersections of power and space at multiple scales. It challenges the logic of either/or reasoning, and related responses to September 11th. The esca...

Transnational economic integration between Thailand and Burma is intimately linked to protection for Burmese refugees in Thailand. In the case of Burmese nationals who seek safety in Thailand, their protection becomes more negotiable as economic integration with Thailand proceeds. Since 1988, hundreds of thousands of Burmese citizens have fled beyo...

The intersections and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few. The notion of a feminist geopolitics remains undeveloped in geography. This paper aims to create a theoretical and practical space in which to articulate a feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics is not an alternative theory of geop...

Immigration is predicated on the centrality of the nation-state. The authors argue that analyzing settlement patterns and successful integration within a strictly national context is insufficient to understand the political, social, and economic relations which shape the lives of refugee immigrants in Canada. To support this claim, a less state-cen...

In this paper, we outline some strategies that we have found useful in our everyday practices as faculty members at a variety of universities in Canada and the USA. We first set a framework for being a mentor while engaging feminist praxis. We then discuss strategies that would be useful in choosing a mentor as well as being a mentor; for mentoring...

Drawing on recent research in the Horn of Africa, emerging patterns of managing forced migration in the post-Cold War landscape are identified and analyzed. While camps continue to house refugees, the meaning and value of ‘refugee’ have changed dramatically since the Cold War. Efforts to prevent people from crossing political borders to seek safety...

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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has a mandate to respond to crises of human displacement on a global scale. The ways in which the organization conceives of gender and culture in this humanitarian context are problematic because they tend either to essentialize 'woman' and 'culture' in the planning process or to minimize th...

In the absence of a coherent set of principles and practices for current crises of displacement, this paper explores some of the ad hoc strategies employed to assist refugees, as the UNHCR adjusts to its expanded role. The reason why UNHCR is facing new challenges is, of course, linked to developments in the international arena, where internal stru...

Using the notion of a “geopolitics of mobility” this paper argues that international borders are more porous to capital than to displaced bodies. Juxtaposing these two levels of mobility generates two distinct but related geographies. Mobility is also theorized by seeing how colonial, Cold War, and ethno-nationalist struggles have shaped people's h...

This paper explores conditions which shape current international interventions to assist displaced persons. In particular, the intersection of neo-liberal politics at the national level with international geopolitics after the CoId War, and subsequent strategies of managing human displacement are examined. First, a trend in domestic politics and po...