Vice-President Research & Innovation Amir Asif announces the appointment of Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC) Professor Jennifer Hyndman as associate vice-president research (AVP), effective Jan. 1, 2021. Hyndman is former director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University where she is resident scholar. Prior to the inauguration of EUC, Hyndman was a professor in Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. She is a prolific scholar in areas related to social sciences and humanities.
“I look forward to welcoming Professor Hyndman to the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation (VPRI) and to working with her as she undertakes this critical leadership role. I would also like to thank the members of the AVP Search Advisory Committee for their contributions to this important process. Committee members include Stephen Anthony Gaetz, Laura Levin, JJ McMurtry, Felix Moses, David J. Phipps and Rebecca Pillai Riddell,” said Asif.
“Additionally, I would like to add my sincere thanks to Professor Celia Haig-Brown who served as AVP for the past five years and worked tirelessly to intensify the services available for all researchers,” he added. Haig-Brown, will be returning to the Faculty of Education after a research break, starting in January 2021.
In her new role, Hyndman will help facilitate the promotion of strategic research development at York and lead the development of research policy that bridges the needs of researchers and the institution. In collaboration with the Office of VPRI and Faculties, she will also help continue to track and build York’s research performance, provide leadership for York’s organized research units and enlarge the University’s collaborative role with external stakeholders and communities, with special emphasis on research areas covered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, including arts, media, performance and design.
Her own research traverses political, economic, cultural and feminist dimensions of migration, focusing on people’s mobility, displacement and security. Her scholarship focuses on the geopolitics of conflict and disaster that displaces people, international humanitarian responses to such events, and geographies of refugee sponsorship, inclusion and participation in Canada.
Her current research projects investigate: (1) how private refugee sponsorship is sustained over time and across space in Canadian communities, with Kathy Sherrell (co-applicant); (2) the motivations of sponsors and the meanings they attach to the work they do, with Audrey Macklin (P.I.), Luin Goldring, Anna Korteweg and Shauna Labman (co-investigators); and (3) the social determinants of well-being and integration among Syrians to Canada after November 2015, with Michaela Hynie (P.I.) and other co-investigators in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.
Hyndman is also a prolific scholar whose list of publications – in peer-reviewed journals and with esteemed book publishers – is extensive. Most recently, she co-authored with Wenona Giles Refugees in Extended Exile: Living on the Edge (Routledge, 2017); she has two monographs, Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minnesota University Press, 2000) and Dual Disasters: Humanitarian Aid after the 2004 Tsunami (Kumarian Press, 2011), plus a co-edited volume with Giles, Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (University of California Press, 2004).
Hyndman earned her BA in sociology and English from the University of Alberta; her MA from Lancaster University in sociology; and her PhD in geography from the University of British Columbia.