Jennifer Hyndman

My research traverses political, economic, urban, cultural and feminist dimensions of migration, focusing on people's mobility, displacement, and security. I am particularly concerned with the dynamics of conflict and disaster that create refugee-migrants, as well as international humanitarian responses to such crises. The books I’ve published examine, for example, the highly spatialized power relations of managing human displacement; dual disasters – or the intersection of conflict with the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia, the ways in which violence is gendered, racialized and sexualized in war zones; and the embodied geopolitics of containment that characterizes human displacement across world regions. My work connects these globalized and usually urban landscapes of displacement with their local expression through geographies of refugee settlement (and exclusion) in the global North. Specifically, I contribute to critical policy studies of refugee-migrant research and immigration policy in Canada.
Representative Publications
Hyndman, J. 2011. Dual Disasters: Humanitarian Aid after the 2004 Tsunami. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press.
Hyndman, J. 2010. The Question of the Political in Critical Geopolitics: Querying the 'Child Soldier' in the 'War on Terror.’” Political Geography 29 (5): 247-255.
Giles, W. and J. Hyndman, eds. 2004. Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones. Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Hyndman, J. 2000. Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.
Keywords: Geopolitics and securitization of forced migration from conflict zones and refugee camps to resettlement; Sri Lanka; Indonesia