Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (CARFMS / ACERMF)
I came to Canada in June, 2011 with my family as a refugee. The government sponsored us under the Government Assessment Refugee (GAR) program. We came from Syria, but I am originally from Somalia. First, when I came to Canada I did not speak English very well, I was in level one English. My first year in Canada, I faced a lot of obstacles such as language barriers, lack of Canadian experience and the culture…
Read MoreRefugees are doubly victimized, first by the warriors and ideologues that forced them to flee their homelands if they wanted to survive, and then, a second time, when persons in authority like the malignant narcissist and serial liar, Donald Trump, placed an indefinite ban[1] on Syrian refugees coming to the United States, and then a “temporary” 90-day ban on refugees coming to the United States from six other countries – Iraq, Iran,[2] Libya, Somalia, Sudan…
Read MoreWe’ve all seen the disturbing images of refugee camps from around the world. Those refugees are deserving of attention. But what the world has largely ignored are urban refugees, who often blend into the chaos of city life and aren’t so visible to the media. Urban refugees have fallen even further below the radar. In anthropologist Michael Agier’s critique of the refugee camp apparatus, Managing the Undesirables, he reminds us that camps can be…
Read MoreBy Stephanie Stobbe – Chair, CARFMS 2016 Conference Nota bene: you may click on each page below to zoom. Alternatively, a PDF document is available here.
Read MoreWhen the UNHCR released its 2015 Global Trends Report: World at War, the then United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, stated, “We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before.”[1] Worldwide displacement was the highest ever recorded at 59.5 million people.[2] Some 19.5 million were refugees, 38.2 million were…
Read Moreby Petra Molnar and Stephanie J. Silverman. Petra Molnar is a migration researcher and refugee advocate in Toronto. She is currently the Public Interest Articling Fellow at the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, working in immigration and family law with women who have experienced domestic violence. Stephanie J. Silverman is the 2015 Bora Laskin Fellow in Human Rights Research and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of…
Read Moreby Michaela Hynie, CARFMS President. As I write this, I am sitting on a train from Poznan to Warsaw with several CARFMS members, having just attended the 2016 meeting of our sister organization, the International Association of Studies in Forced Migration (IASFM). Four hundred delegates from around the world met for four stimulating, enriching and thought provoking days. A graduate student working in refugee camps in Jordan noted that we often feel isolated in…
Read MoreWe would like to give CARFMS members an opportunity to have their say on those issues and concerns that are important to you and others. The CARFMS Blog provides you with the opportunity to reach the members of CARFMS, a highly knowledgeable and informed group of scholars, policymakers, practitioners, instructors and students on the issues and concerns in the field of refugee and forced migration studies and a broader public audience who are interested in…
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Le français suit 14th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association