Laura Bisaillon

Laura Bisaillon is an Associate Professor at the Department of Health and Society, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada.

Dr. Bisaillon is a political sociologist. The overarching concerns in her scholarly agenda can be summarized in the following questions: What do we know about migration, health and the state? How is what we know about the interactions between these socially organized? What are the relationships between knowledge and action on these topics? These queries are embedded within numerous ongoing, concrete societal conundrums. For example, how do medical, legal and administrative forms of governance and regulation within the Canadian immigration system work? What are the consequences of these relations? For whom do these arrangements matter? Why should we care?

These questions underlie and echo throughout feminist theory and all branches of critical social sciences and humanities scholarship. She approaches these and other such questions as an applied sociologist: engaging with social theory and carrying out institutional ethnographic fieldwork studies in Canada, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iran, and Romania. She is fluent in English and French and expresses commentary and research findings variously: scholarly article and blog, poetry, popular writing, photo essay, and installation art. “Unmaking Medical Inadmissibility” is the name of her current project, for which she produced a film and original artwork.

Media availability: TV, Radio, Print/Online