Towards Decolonizing Migration Knowledge

Mehrunnisa Ahmad Ali is a Professor in the Faculty of Community Services at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada and Principal Investigator of the DemiKnow project. Her graduate degrees are from Harvard University and Michigan State University. Her academic career began in Pakistan where she planned and evaluated programs for girls’ education and teacher education, funded by international development agencies. This work included an evaluation of the ‘partnership’ between Oxford University, University of Toronto, and Institute for Educational Development, Aga Khan University. Upon her migration to Canada, her focus shifted to studies on immigrant and refugee children, youth, and families. She was Domain Leader and then Co-Director of CERIS, the Ontario Metropolis Centre for over ten years, a multi-university research centre, funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada (SSHRC) for an unprecedented 15 years. Her recent works include a documentary about Syrian refugee children’s memories, and articles in Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Refuge, Canadian Ethnic Studies, International Journal of Educational Development and other refereed journals; chapters in Routledge Encyclopedia of Migration (in A. Triandafyllidou, 2022) and Putting Families First (in H. Bauder 2019); a book called Ethical Issues in Research with Refugee Children, Youth and Families (Edited, UBC Press, 2025,) and a forthcoming book provisionally entitled Colonization of Immigrant Families (UBC Press). She is the Principal Investigator of DemiKnow, a Partnership Development Project, funded by SSHRC.

1. Generating Migration Knowledge under Epistemic Colonialism (Mehrunnisa Ahmad Ali & Sanaa Ali-Mohammad).- 2. Chinese Knowledge Production and Flows: Learning from Others and Producing Our Own Knowledge (Yi Li).- 3. Migrant Academics: Unpacking Identity, Equity, and Diversity in Migration Discourses (Anna Triandafyllidou and Ashika Niraula).- 4. Portability of Concepts in Migration Governance: Temporary Migration (Anna Triandafyllidou and Rica Agnes Castaneda).- 5. Institutional Ethics Boards, National Statements, and Global Projects: Navigating the Administrative Processes and Epistemic Coloniality of Research Ethics Approvals in International Collaborations (Catriona Turnbull, Hien Thi Nguyen, and Loretta Baldassar).- 6. The Bureaucracy of Transnational Research and Hybridity of Academic Cultures (S. Irudaya Rajan, Uthara Geetha, Varsha Joshi ).- 7. Developing, managing and reflecting on the project (Mehrunnisa Ali, Ashika Niraula and Catriona Turnbull).