Kushan Azadah is a PhD candidate in Political Science at York University with a double major in the fields of International Relations and Gender & Politics. His dissertation focuses on the politics of Canada’s Afghan resettlement programs since the fall of Kabul in August of 2021. It aims to explore ways of thinking about Canada’s approach to Afghan resettlement in light of its broader histories with settler-colonial structures of dispossession, displacement, and (re)settlement. The research is contextualized in this way because although there is existing literature about Afghan refugees in relation to settler-states like Canada, there is little acknowledgment of them as settler-states and the influence that this may have in shaping and navigating the political landscape of resettlement policy.
Kushan has an MA in Social Justice & Equity Studies from Brock University where he first became interested in cross-disciplinary research on migrant, settler, and Indigenous solidarities. These interests developed over years of study, work, and engagement in social justice and community efforts in the Niagara and Toronto region. More recently, he has been working at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration where he has been collecting, coding, and analyzing government and civil society materials, in order to track the qualitative shifts in Canadian migration policy and discourse.