Project Objective

The first aim of this project, which is of a scholarly nature, is to assess the degree to which TRV refusals impede the inclusion of Africa-based scholars in the internationalization of Canadian research universities.

The second aim, which falls in the register of public policy design, is to conceive ways to reform TRV issuance to facilitate collaboration with African academics in research and training.

We anticipate that our study will raise awareness of the ways that factors such as country of origin, race, economic status, language and gender inform Canadian internationalization of higher learning, influence Canadian immigration policy and shape flows of foreign scholars to Canada. We will build on our interdisciplinary expertise in History, Law, Sociology, Human Rights, Political Science, Critical Race Studies and IR, and on our relationships with academic and civil society networks across Canada to achieve these research objectives:

To produce a comprehensive mapping of reasons for Canadian Visa Application Centre (VAC) personnel’s refusal of TRVs to Africa-based researchers seeking entry to Canada;
To create a large database pertaining to TRV refusal to Africa-based researchers invited by Canadians through the design of a web application that can be used by various stakeholders (program administrators; international admissions offices; research offices; scholarly associations, etc.);
To achieve an empirically-researched understanding of the impact of TRV refusals to African researchers on Canada-based researchers, academic institutions, and students;
To mobilize Canada-based researchers who actively collaborate with Africa-based scholars to form an advisory group to discuss with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) ways to make TRV issuance to African researchers more transparent and predictable