UnborderED Knowledge: Building bridges between lived experience and academic excellence
We’re proud to be a partner on an ambitious and important pan-Canadian project that will transform how Canada supports displaced scholars and researchers. UnborderED Knowledge will create systematic pathways to education and research opportunities, recognizing that people with lived experiences of forced migration bring invaluable perspectives to academic and research communities.
Since 2017 we’ve run the Immigration Insight Scholar (IIS) Initiative, a project for internationally educated research professionals in Canada, as well as the Immigrant Researchers Support Network, an online peer support network for IIS scholars and other internationally educated researchers. In that time, we’ve supported 25 IIS Fellows to secure work in their field through short-term fellowship opportunities.
Our goal has always been to support the professional success of internationally trained researchers and evaluators by promoting active peer support and providing appropriate opportunities for career networking and professional development.
Moving forward, UnborderED Knowledge will directly support over 650 students and researchers through mentorship, training, and research placements with community partners. All resources will be bilingual and freely accessible, ensuring the impact extends far beyond direct participants.
What makes this project particularly powerful is its collaborative approach. Displaced students and researchers aren’t just beneficiaries. They are co-creators. They will develop multimedia materials and contribute empirical data on promising practices. Created as a partnership model with 13 academic, research and community partners from across Canada (including Access Alliance) we will generate real solutions to structural barriers while amplifying voices that have too often been marginalized in academic spaces.
Access Alliance will work on a specific research question: How can institutionalized hiring practices in academic and non-academic research organizations facilitate equitable opportunities for researchers with lived experiences of forced migration?
UnborderED Knowledge will take an explicit rights-based approach to equity. Together with our partners we will analyze direct and indirect discrimination and implicit and explicit intersectional barriers that pose structural constraints to displaced people’s ability to exercise their rights to work and study. Our EDI Framework will be a useful tool in this work.
The ultimate goal?
Concrete policy recommendations that will reshape how Canadian institutions approach equity, diversity, and inclusion to better reflect the unique experiences and contributions of displaced scholars.
We will continue to share updates and progress as UnborderED Knowledge rolls out. Follow along as we scale up to create more opportunities for internationally educated research professionals in Canada.
Related Access Alliance work
Empowering Internationally Trained Professionals to Become “Change Agents”
Initiatives such as the CBR training series and the Immigrant Researcher Support Network events aim to support internationally educated immigrants (researchers/analysts, epidemiologists, statisticians, clinicians, scientists, evaluation experts, and community based researchers, and more!) in their journey towards finding meaningful employment, and become ‘agents of change’ in their own lives and within their communities.
Labour Market Barriers and Solutions for Internationally Educated Researchers in Canada: Social and Health Implications
Canada is home to a large immigrant and refugee population. Current information confirms the underemployment of the internationally educated professionals. The overall process and journey of migration can have a large and negative impact on financial, social and mental health. With a limited number of first-hand research studies on the experience and effect of immigration on Internationally Educated Researchers (IERs), this study aims at generating evidence around the challenges faced by the IERs to find suitable professional employment, and recommends solutions to improve the current situation.