Migration Conversations

Meet filmmaker and artist Sook-Yin Lee, graphic artist Chester Brown and experts Dr. Chris Bruckert and Dr. Ummni Khan. Following a screening of the film Paying For It, this panel discussed the book behind the film, and how how law circumscribes love, intimacy and our relationships. Sponsored by the Greenberg Chair for Women and the Legal Profession, this event took place in September 2025.

Join this intimate conversation between Adelle Blackett, Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law at the Faculty of Law, McGill University and Canisia Lubrin, award winning poet and writer who teaches at the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA program. They talk about Canisia's debut fiction Code Noir and the enduring legacies of the colonial law that created the material conditions of slavery.

We speak with four lawyers who intervene in the courts on behalf of community organizations. What is an intervention and why is it an important entry point for community organizations to converse with the courts. With Sandra Ka Hon Chu, Rosel Kim, Annamaria Enenajor and Naseem Mithoowani, we talk about four case studies they worked on, the importance of incremental change, and how the long game is important to have in sight.

Meet Justin Piché, co author of the book How to Abolish Prisons with Rachel Herzing. We talk about this book and how abolition is not just a theoretical concept but a practice and a possibility. Justin reveals his research with Rachel and how collective reconstruction to get rid of human cages is a viable movement despite the dark struggles around us.

Martin Luther King Jr once said that civil disobedience is not lawlessness but a higher form of lawfulness. In this episode, I speak with Faisal Bhabha, Irina Ceric and Paul Champ, lawyers and scholars intimate with protest and law. We talk about three case studies and what are appropriate legal limits to protest in a democratic society.

Meet Douglas Chong, director of the Hawai'i Chinese History Centre. We talk about the long historical presence of Chinese in Hawai'i, how personal and community archives are essential to counter narratives produced by Western sources, and why it is important to remember the past.

Meet Dr. Nandita Sharma, author of Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants. Her provocative book interrogates the nation-state system and the anti-colonial and post-colonial aspiration to seek nationalized sovereignty through a terr=itorialized form - that sovereignty as territorial rule is the pinnacle of liberation for some communities. In this conversation, I ask Dr. Sharma some tough questions and she provides an articulate invitation to think about things differently as we discuss how we move towards a decolonized and more equitable world.

Meet Dr. Kyle Kajihiro who teaches at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in Ethnic Studies and Geography and Environment. His research focuses on U.S. imperial formations, militarization, and Indigenous and decolonial social movements in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific region. He is also a founding member of Hawai'i Peace and Justice, an organization working to promote peace and social justice in Hawai'i through community organizing, popular education, art and nonviolent direct action. In this episode, we talk about the Detour project an educational tour project which give visitors insights into the realities of militarization and tourism . If you have been or plan on traveling to Hawai'i, this is a must listen to episode - a kind of audio guide alternative to the info you might receive otherwise.

In the third instalment of Migration Conversations' Hawai'i Series, I speak with Dr. Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, a professor in political science at the College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. His research focuses on the mobilization of rights discourses in various contexts. We discuss his new book Law by Night, nocturnal legal theory and how law is both present and absent from this temporal space. In our discussion he raises questions about the right to sleep, the freedom to organize and assert agency at night, and how night has shaped the politics of race, vigilantism, gun ownership and white feminist actions like Take Back the Night.

Welcome to the first episode of a special series of Migration Conversations in Hawai'i. In this episode I am in conversation with Noelani Goodyear-Ka’ōpua in an outdoor park with light rain tickling us. Born to young activists and UH graduates, Noelani grew up around Hawai’I communities and movements organizing around evictions, environmental degradation and economic injustice. Now a professor in political science at the College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai’I at Manoā, her work focuses on documenting, theorizing and practising Hawaiian sovereignty movement and invests her time and energy into education and the ‘āina, nurturing critical thinkers and doers. Her book Nā Wāhine Koa: Hawaiian Women for Sovereignty and Demilitarization is a collaboration with four activist elders who helped catalyze Hawaiian movements of the late 20th century.

In this episode I speak with Gabriela Casineanu about the Immigrant Writers Association, how writing can be cathartic and an important way to share stories and perspectives of migrants. Check out their four anthologies of writing from various writers.

Meet Heba Gowayed, an economic sociologist at Boston University. She is the author of "Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential". Her book follows the journeys of Syrians who sought refuge in Canada, Germany and the United States. Dr. Gowayed's insights in how states design refugee programs and how that affects people's resettlement experiences is illuminating.

Meet Natalie Wee, a queer poet who writes about migration, borders, papers, and interrogates what it means to be a queer, racialized person in Canada. We talk about what it is like to live with precarious immigration status, and how writing is a source of comfort and advocacy.