OTTAWA - Thinking Out Loud: The Immigrant Paradox

Paquette’s work focuses on comparative immigration policies, examining the role of bureaucracies in shaping these policies, the evolution of attitudes towards specific immigration programs, and political debates surrounding the use of technology in the immigration sector.

As a public-policy specialist, her research has primarily concentrated on Canada in a comparative context, including with Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

As the director of the Concordia University Institute for Research on Migration and Society (IRMS), Paquette leads various projects under the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) research program Bridging Divides: Immigrant Integration in the 21st Century. As a member of the Équipe de recherche sur l’immigration au Québec et ailleurs (ERIQA) and the Immigration Research Initiative (IRI), she contributes to numerous inter-institutional and multidisciplinary teams.

Paquette also serves as co-director of the Réseau de recherche sur l’immigration, l’intégration et les relations interculturelles au Québec (RQ3I), which aims to connect academic research with public policy in Quebec.

Tiwary’s research interests include video cultures, media infrastructures, migration, contraband media practices and media aesthetics. She has published essays in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, JumpCut, Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities, Culture Machine,  MARG: Journal of Indian Art. 

Tiwary directs Raah the research lab, which aims to examine the intersection of migratory processes and media practices. Raah’s project is a community-driven model, which hopes to bring together scholars, activists and community partners in a single space, to become the first institutional hub in Canada for the study of media and migration.

Ryder has dual training in clinical psychology and cultural psychology, along with sustained exposure to the interdisciplinary field of transcultural psychiatry.

His scholarly work aims to integrate these disciplines, particularly through empirical contributions falling under three broad and interrelated themes:

• The cultural shaping of emotions and emotional disorders, with an emphasis on East Asian societies: China, Korea, and Japan;
• The acculturation process and its implications for mental health in migrants to Montreal, focusing in particular on the development of better assessment tools to measure key aspects of acculturation;
• Best practices for evidence-based psychological interventions that are transcultural and transdiagnostic.

These three themes are united by the subfield of Cultural-Clinical Psychology, which Ryder is helping to develop and promote through collaborative conceptual work.

Chapman has played a central role in the establishment of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 and was appointed by the Government of Canada in 2011 to be its first CEO, with reappointments in 2016 and 2021.

She served as the museum’s director of marketing, sales and development from 2003 to 2011 and has been its chief operating officer since 2008. In 2015, Chapman oversaw a renovation that doubled the museum’s size.

Under her leadership, Pier 21 has evolved into a national museum with the facilities, technology and team to share the diverse history of the Canadian immigration experience with visitors from across Canada and around the world. The museum is Canada’s sixth national museum, the second to be established outside the National Capital Region and the only one in Atlantic Canada.

Salas is a visual journalist who has worked across Canada and around the world. Before her appointment at Concordia, she was a video journalist, assignment editor and line-up editor at CTV Montreal for nearly a decade.

She has also hosted a current affairs radio program on 940 Montreal, and was the senior anchor for Global Quebec. As a national correspondent for CityTV, Salas spent three years reporting on Parliament Hill. She was additionally a national correspondent for CTV News in Montreal, and the network's transportation reporter in Toronto.

Salas began her visual journalism career at the Reuters East Africa bureau in Nairobi, Kenya. She produced a number of short documentaries in several West African countries, including Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. Salas has also worked in India, England and the United States and sailed around the Pacific Ocean as part of the Government of Japan initiative.