26th Canadian Ethnic Studies Association Biennial Conference Local Organizing Committee

Evangelia Tastsoglou, CESA President, Professor – Saint Mary’s University

Evangelia Tastsoglou, PhD, LLM, is Professor of Sociology and Global Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University. Her research engages feminist and intersectional perspectives on women, gender and various aspects of international migration; Canadian immigration and integration; violence, citizenship, transnationalism and diasporas. Her recent, co-authored and (co)edited books include: Interrogating Gender, Violence, and the State in National and Transnational Contexts, Current Sociology Monograph Series (Vol. 64:4, July 2016) and Gender-Based Violence in Migration: Interdisciplinary, Feminist and Intersectional Approaches (Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming in 2022). She is currently the principal investigator of a 4-member Canadian team of the CIHR-funded project “Violence against Women Migrants and Refugees: Analyzing Causes and Effective Policy Response”, part of an international project funded by the GENDER-NET Plus Cofund. She is also the principal investigator of a SSHRC-funded project on “Gendering Violence and Precarity in Forced Migration: Asylum Seeking Women in the Eastern Mediterranean” and co-PI of an interdisciplinary NFRFE two-year project on “Visual Analytics for Text-Intensive Social Science Research on Immigration.” Dr. Tastsoglou has served as president of RC 32 (the Research Committee on Women in Society) of the ISA (2010-2014), elected member of the ISA Research Council (2014-2018), chairperson of the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Saint Mary’s University (2006-2012), and International Development Studies Coordinator (2017-2021). She is the recipient of the Saint Mary’s University President’s Award for Excellence in Research (2021).

More information about Evangelia Tastsoglougelia

Min-Jung Kwak, Associate Professor – Saint Mary’s University

Dr. Kwak is an economic and social geographer with broad research interests in immigration and settlement studies. She has conducted research projects on education migration, immigrant entrepreneurship, immigrant healthcare accessibility and transnational migrant family experiences. Dr. Kwak is the co-editor of the book: “Outward and Upward Mobilities: International Students in Canada, Their Families and Structuring Institutions”. She is currently working on several collaborative projects including the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) funded project entitled “the Korea in the world and the world in Korea studies”, the SSHRC Insight Grant (IG) project, “Intellectual Migration: the US, China and Canada Dynamics” and the most recent SSHRC COVID Partnership Engagement Grant project, “the Socio-economic Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Nova Scotia” working with ISANS (Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia) . In collaboration with the colleagues in 8 universities in North America, Dr. Kwak contributes to the AKS project by collecting and redefining Korean-Canadian Studies. For the SSHRC IG project, she is collaborating with the colleagues in the US, China and Canada to investigate the motivation of highly educated individuals and the dynamics of global knowledge and human capital flows. Over the years, Dr. Kwak has worked with various immigrant groups in major Canadian cities and in particular she has developed significant research partnerships with Korean-Canadian and Chinese-Canadian communities.

Cathy Conrad (Suso), Professor – Saint Mary’s University

Cathy Conrad (Suso) is Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies in Nova Scotia, Canada, but shares her time with the Gambia, West Africa, where she is on a life-long journey of learning. After a transition from research on water security and community-based monitoring, her work focuses on West African migration, specifically involuntary immobility and containment development. Her more recent research is focused on investigating environmental and adaptive migration with a special focus on the gendered dimensions. Recent publications include “Totally napse: aspirations of mobility in Essau, the Gambia”, “Backway or bust: causes and consequences of Gambian irregular migration” and “Involuntary Immobility and the Unfulfilled Rite of Passage: Implications for Migration Management in the Gambia, West Africa”. Cathy Conrad (Suso) is currently the principal investigator on SSHRC Insight Development Grant “Women and children on the move: Irregular migration journeys from West Africa”, which recently brought her back to the Gambia to conduct interviews and focus groups with Gambian women to better understand the female migrant journey. This current area of focus leads to her ongoing research titled “We Do Not Want our Sisters to Suffer: Female Migrant Journeys from the Gambia, West Africa”.

Serperi Sevgür, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow – Saint Mary’s University

Dr. Sevgür is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in Sociology, Psychology and International Development Studies, with research and teaching interests in contemporary political economy and international migration. Her research examines issues of feminization of work and migration in the context of local and global inequalities, particularly in Post-Soviet spaces, in addition to gender dynamics, and family relations across transnational spaces. She is actively engaged with subjects of migration and integration in Canada by taking part in research projects which evaluate settlement programs, and in forums that are designed for knowledge transfer and policy formulation.