Canan Şahin (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the UnborderED Knowledge project at Saint Mary’s University, where her work focuses on Academic Integration. She holds a PhD in Political Studies from Queen’s University. Her doctoral research developed a historical-materialist analysis of forced displacement governance and racialized labour in Turkey. Her research examines forced migration, labour, and state formation, with particular attention to how the racialization of forcibly displaced populations produces stratified labour markets and conditions of surplus and disposability. Canan has also worked as an independent program evaluator in Canada, conducting community-engaged research with resettled refugees and newcomer-serving organizations. Her broader interests include refugee and migrant justice, the political economy of displacement, and collaborative approaches to knowledge production with displaced communities.

Anastasiia Mykolenko is a Postdoctoral Fellow with UnborderED Knowledge, hosted by World University Service of Canada (WUSC). She is completing a PhD in anthropology from the Université de Montréal. She also holds an LL.M. in European Law from the College of Europe, following law studies in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Her doctoral research, based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, examined displacement, humanitarian infrastructure, and uncertainty at the Polish-Ukrainian border. During her doctorate, she worked as a protection assistant with Première Urgence Internationale in Przemyśl and coordinated research on forced displacement in Moldova, Romania, and Poland. Originally from Horlivka, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, she brings a personal lived experience of displacement to this work. At UnborderED, she contributes to research on access to higher education for refugee and displaced youth in Canada. She also serves as Executive Coordinator of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA).

Mariia Vitrukh is a postdoctoral researcher with UnborderED Knowledge, working with Access Alliance and York University on a project about the experiences of displaced students. Mariia earned her Ph.D. in Education Policy and Evaluation from Arizona State University and has published her work related to Higher Education and Policy Research, Qualitative Inquiry, Post-humanist Research, Arts-based Research and Embodied Research Methodologies. She has a special interest in the lived experiences of forced migrants, mapping stories of forced migration, tracing and collecting live accounts and archival data. Mariia has experience working with internally displaced students and academics, as well as those Ukrainians who were forced to leave the country. Mariia has publications in Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (CSCM) and International Journal of Social Research Methodology, among others. Her monograph has recently been published with Routledge Research in Crises Education. Her hobbies include hiking, water coloring, creative writing and reading.

Maya El Helou is a postdoctoral fellow with the UnborderED Knowledge project at the University of Ottawa, where they work on multimodal knowledge production and governance. El Helou holds a PhD in Anthropology and Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto, where they produced a graphic ethnography that explores queer and trans life, affect, state violence, and Necropolitics in Beirut. There, they taught courses in anthropology, gender, and sexuality studies. They also collaborated with the Ethnography Lab to create and organize several series on knowledge production and the arts, including Entertaining the Graphic in the Ethnographic. Their forthcoming graphic ethnography, Queer and Trans Antagonism Against the Consortium of Let Die in Beirut, yokes together visual storytelling and ethnographic theory. El Helou is an anthropologist, comic artist, and writer whose academic work and public-facing projects center on collaborative and creative pedagogy that makes scholarship both critical and accessible.