Professor Alison Mountz will be presenting her work on the shifting geographies of asylum-seeking, landscapes and policies of protection, and resettlement of refugees in North America from remote islands in the Pacific.
Alison Mountz is a full Professor in the Department of Human Geography and the Associate Vice-Principal of Research & Innovation, Strategic Partnerships & Initiatives at the University of Toronto, Scarborough (UTSC). Her research explores how people cross borders, access asylum, survive detention, resist war, and create safe havens. She advises student research on migration and displacement, borders, and political and feminist geographies. Her transnational research on migration means that she works in many regions of the world. She also directs the new ‘Haven: Asylum Lab’ designed to preserve and provide access to migration-related data. She writes and is also interested in the mobilization of knowledge through art. Before moving to UTSC, Professor Mountz was a faculty at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University’s Balsillie School for International Affairs. She held a Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at Laurier and the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professorship of Canadian Studies at Harvard University. She is a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.