What inspired you to co-author this book? 

Yasmeen: There's been a real politicization of immigration, particularly over the last decade, where we see in many countries a lot of political parties and politicians trying to gain votes by being negative around what immigration does and being critical of refugees. And so out of that sense that there was a lot of stuff going on at the political level, that was one big reason why we came together. The other is that we were really working across different disciplines in this book and coming to the realization that as the study of immigration has increased across disciplines, we also needed to be doing work around thinking about what that means for our knowledge building. And so this is not only a multidisciplinary book that brings together different editors across, you know, the social sciences and fine arts and education, but also different authors. 

But we even went a little further than that because we also realize that there's a lot of knowledge about immigration that comes from people that are in the immigrant-serving sector as well as from refugees themselves. The chapters in our book volume are written not only by academics or researchers in the field, but by practitioners and also by refugees themselves. And it's really bringing together these different knowledges that different stakeholders have that we get a fuller picture of the situation. And what we were trying to do in that book is identify the ways that dehumanization occurs, but also to think about how dehumanization is resisted. That part is, I think, a real interesting contribution of the book in terms of bringing to bear the different knowledges that our authors bring with them. 

What kind of research is in the book? 

Yasmeen: This is a book that I co-edited with professors at University of Alberta. And these were Michael Frishkopf, who's in the Music Department, who's an ethnomusicologist, Anna Kirova, who is an education professor, and my colleague, Reza Hasmath, who is also in the Department of Political Science. When we were bringing together different understandings that we held as editors and also different understandings that our authors were bringing, one of the big things we wanted to think about is how and why dehumanization is a problem, right? And one of the big reasons that dehumanization is a problem is it turns off empathy for others, so it becomes easy to dismiss their feelings, to dismiss their experiences. And when you're looking at refugees, this is something that can happen before resettlement, it can happen during resettlement, it can happen after resettlement. 

And what do we mean by dehumanization? Well, it's things like, it can be, sometimes, very overt. Like if you think about when Donald Trump was president, he said of undocumented folks entering the United States, “these aren't people. These are animals.” And so that's a really direct way, and blatant way that dehumanization may take place. But also sometimes politicians can do it when they're talking about, you know, refugees flooding across borders, or they can do it when they talk about refugees coming in in swarms, as if they're insects. And even sometimes researchers can do it because we sometimes, you know, start to use statistics and stop talking about people and kind of start using numbers. And so, collectively, our contributors are talking about these kinds of things when they're looking at dehumanization in countries like Canada, and also other countries like Canada, like Australia, the United States, and countries of Europe. And they're looking, also, at ways to challenge dehumanization. 

So we have a total of 17 chapters in the book. And the book really focuses on four major themes: the role of immigration policies and the media in the dehumanization of refugees; the educational institutions and programs and how that may contribute to the dehumanization of refugees; looking at countering dehumanization, and one component of this is what the role of the state is, right? So for example, the state may make apologies and there may be new approaches by the state in relation to policies that come to bear. Really thinking about what refugees themselves may do, like their own agency and the things that they may do to counter dehumanization. 

The end result is really that the book is quite policy relevant. So we have practitioners, for example, that highlight how resettlement policy could be more customized to address not just the immediate needs of refugees, but also what happens to folks before they enter a country like Canada. We have insights about the kinds of programs that might be relevant. So there's an insightful chapter by Jwamer Jalal on how to better support refugee youth through community based programs that can bring youth together. We have, also, some very critical and insightful discussions about the limits of state policies for past wrongdoing. 

So, for example, there's a chapter by Abigail Bakan that's addressing Prime Minister Trudeau's apology for Canada's role in relation to the MS St. Louis, which was this infamous ship that was turned away from Cuba, from the United States and, finally, from Canada. And on that ship there were 900 German Jews seeking refuge from Nazi Germany in 1939. That ship got turned back to Germany and, subsequently, 254 of the MS St. Louis passengers were killed in the Holocaust. And so in 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued an apology for Canada's refusal to accept these Jewish refugees. And so in that chapter, Abigail Bakan really argues that this apology was really long overdue and important, but also that parts of the narrative that Prime Minister Trudeau gave asserted some understandings that kind of worked to deny the claims of Palestinian refugees. And so you have this kind of contradiction of like, on the one hand, giving recognition for something wrong where Jewish refugees were dehumanized, but now sometimes, you know in the language that the Prime Minister used, kind of making invisible the rights claims of Palestinian refugees and their humanity. So these are the kind of critical interventions that we have coming from scholars, coming from practitioners and coming from refugees themselves. 

I think one of the other exciting features of the book is that it looks at the role of the arts and the role that arts can play in countering and resisting dehumanization. So this can be things like literary production or poetry. These are included in the book. Also, music is included in the book. So there's actually a concert featuring different musicians, who initially came to Canada as refugees, who held a concert with Michael Frishkopf here at the University of Alberta. And we recorded this concert, and it's embedded in the book through a link. And so this is a book that's very multimedia in terms of the contributions of the authors and contributors to the book. 

Why is this research so important? 

Yasmeen: The research is important because we continue to see the way in which dehumanization occurs with refugees in particular. We can just think about what's happening right now in the news. I mean, we're talking in August 2024 and literally the headlines of the past week, what we are seeing is that there's serious disorder in the United Kingdom as a result of the mobilization of far right, white supremacist, anti-immigrant groups. And this all came about because there was a 17 year old youth who was charged in a stabbing attack that led to the deaths of three little girls in the town of Southport in the UK, and also having many others in critical condition. The UK law does not generally allow for the publication of names of minors, and in this sort of vacuum of knowing anything about the youth that had committed this, or was accused of committing this crime, you had the festering of a lot of not only misinformation but disinformation, like deliberate lying that quickly grew on social media. And the attacker came to be falsely presented in far right circles as an asylum seeker. So ostensibly, the reason that there are these riots in the UK is that rioters are saying that they don't want, that they're responding to this incident and, in responding to this incident, they're making use of anti immigrant slogans, anti refugee slogans. They're attacking mosques, they're attacking hotels hosting asylum seekers, even actually, they're attacking immigration lawyers that may work to help refugees make claims or asylum seekers making claims. And you've had many anti racist think tanks in the UK, like the Runnymede Trust, which blame this mobilization on the way for many years politicians, especially but not only conservative politicians, as well as the media, have kind of politicized immigration, dehumanized refugees through language in the UK, like "stop the boats” – they want to prevent boats of asylum seekers from entering the country – or saying things along the lines of, “we want our country back.” There's a lot of issues at stake around the dehumanization of refugees, where it can be, you know, even violent like, this leads to violence. 

It's interesting also, that right now, after days of this kind of mobilization of these far right groups, there were thousands of peaceful, anti-fascist, anti-racist activists that were taking to the streets and proclaiming that refugees are welcome. And this, along with some of the increased police presence, is being credited, at least by London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, with helping to quell the riots. And so you see this dynamic of dehumanization and also resistance to dehumanization taking place in this incident that's occurring in the summer of 2024, but we can see it in many different ways in different countries. 

We really felt like this was an important volume for kind of taking this dynamic of dehumanization and resistance to dehumanization, and exploring it further and really pulling out the ways in which we can have greater resistance to the dehumanization of of refugees.

Opportunities for future research

Yasmeen: There's many research opportunities in the area of immigration, and looking at the experience of immigrants, and looking at the experience of refugees. And right now, we're very fortunate at the University of Alberta to be part of a larger national project involving 4 universities, Concordia University, Toronto Metropolitan University and UBC, where researchers are looking at questions of immigrant and refugee integration in the context of advanced digital technologies. And that's a huge new area of research because as we're speaking, things are really changing as a result of technological developments, including artificial intelligence. And AI and advanced digital technologies may start to play more and more of a role in the ways that we think about determining who is let into a country, not just in Canada but in other countries. So the use of advanced digital technologies in looking at, you know, entry of newcomers, but also in relation to integration and ways that might be used. For example, apps that might help support people in language acquisition or in finding jobs or those kinds of things. 

Just as we have a lot of questions in society at large about what is our future with these new technologies, with artificial intelligence and other things, there's a lot of questions that emerge when you're looking at refugees and immigrants. And so I think the project that we were just involved with gives some useful clues about thinking about how to conduct research because, of course, you know, people that are researchers at universities know how to do research. We're trained on how to do research, but we're not the only knowledge holders. So there's knowledge coming from, you know, immigrant serving communities. There's knowledge coming from policymakers. There's knowledge coming from refugees and immigrants themselves about their experiences, and I think, you know, the way that we can kind of build on the work that Michael Frishkopf, Reza Hasmath, Anna Kirova and I were doing in this edited volume is to continue that practice of bringing these different knowledges together and realizing that it's only by really creating fora where you can allow for this kind of exchange that you get better information that can give us a clearer understanding of where we're going as a society in Canada, where the world is going and also, how to have better policy than we might have at the moment. 

Where to access the book?

Yasmeen: The book is available in a hard copy version and you can purchase it if you want it in this kind of version, but it's also an Open Access book published by Athabasca University Press. And so if you go on to the link that is provided, you will find the book and you can download it as a PDF. We were really happy to be able to make this free of charge given the salience of the issues for Canada, and for many countries around the world.