The Research Team
Anna Korteweg
@anna_korteweg
Anna Korteweg (Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto Mississauga) is an accomplished researcher, digital storyteller, and builder of scholarly communities, whose work focuses on understanding the position of Muslim citizens in contemporary European and North American societies. She has published extensively on debates surrounding the wearing of the headscarf, so-called “honour-based” violence, and Sharia law. In addition to the project discussed on this website, her current work looks at the co-construction of borders and subjectivity in LGBTQ+ refugee politics, and the citizenship implications of refugee sponsorship in Canada. She has published two monographs: The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging (Stanford UP 2014, with Gökçe Yurdakul) and Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (edited with Jennifer Selby, UToronto Press 2012), as well as over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She was a visiting professor at the Department of Sociology, the University of Bielefeld (2013), and at the Amsterdam Center for European Studies, University of Amsterdam (2022). Korteweg was Chair of the Department of Sociology from 2015-20. Her research has been funded by multiple grants from the Social Science Research Council Canada, and funding from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdient (DAAD), and the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS), among others. Korteweg is co-editor of Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society.
Gökce Yurdakul
@GokceYurdakul
Gökce Yurdakul is Georg Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social Conflict at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Chair in the Department of Foundations of Migration Research at the Berlin Institute of Migration and Integration Research (BIM). She was the Director of the Department of Social Sciences at her university from 2019-21. Her areas of interest are gender, immigration, citizenship, specifically issues of Muslim women in Western Europe. Her research has been funded by national and international grants, including the Social Science Research Council Canada, German Center for Migration Research (DeZIM) and GIF (German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research). She was a visiting scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at the Harvard University in 2019, where she was affiliated with the Comparative Inequalities and Inclusion Research Cluster. She wrote and edited five books, most recently, The Headscarf Debates: Conflict of National Belonging (2014, Stanford University Press, with Anna Korteweg), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Yurdakul and Korteweg started a new book-length project on how the politics of non-belonging are produced in the European media and political debate. Yurdakul is an associate editor for the leading feminist journal, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society.
Jillian Sunderland
@SocJillian
I am a Sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral scholar. My academic focus is on masculinities, power, and violence, but I frame these issues in relation to anti-black racism and settler colonialism in Canada. Throughout my work I typically employ document and narrative analysis to archival, media, web forums, governmental documents, and policy reports. In 2022, I have recently published my first academic article in the journal of Men and Masculinities along with a first-person article for CBC National News. I have a commitment to engaging in public sociology and my sociological insights can be found in The Medium, The Varsity, CBC Radio, and CBC Kids News.
I have worked as an RA for Borders Boundaries Bodies since 2019 and am presently the lead RA on the UK context and the case study of Shamima Begum. My duties have included archiving and analyzing all relevant media discussions, Hansard/Governmental Debates, Legal documents, and Policy Reports. This has also included keeping up with the relevant political context around British Migration and Citizenship revocation, particularly the Nationality and Borders Bill.
Marie-Aminata Peron
Marie-Aminata Peron is a first-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her prospective research project will focus on how migrant communities reconstruct and experience home-far-from-home and the political potential this might represent. She graduated from SOAS University of London with a BA in International Relations and Political Science, as well as from the London School of Economics with an MSc in International Migration and Public Policy. In recent years, Marie-Aminata has been particularly active in migrants’ rights community work and activism. For Borders, Bodies, and Boundaries, she will be the lead researcher for the French case.
Madelon van der Vorst
Madelon van der Vorst is a masters student Forensic Orthopedagogy at the University of Amsterdam. She has a bachelor’s degree in Orthopedagogy from the University of Utrecht. In recent years, she has focussed on international children’s rights and troubled youths in the Netherlands. She currently works in special education as an behavioural scientist (care coördinator) in Amsterdam. For Borders, Bodies, and Boundaries, she has been a researcher for the Dutch case since 2023.