Christopher G. Anderson

My research encompasses both historical and contemporary studies of Canadian citizenship, multiculturalism, immigration and refugee policy. At present I am working on two main strands of research: the first surveys Canadian policies towards asylum seekers in the post-Second World War period while the second explores changes to Canadian citizenship acquisition, maintenance and revocation in the 21st century.

In a related vein to the first research strand, I am working three sub-projects: one that seeks to contextualise Canadian refugee policy within the deep historical reality of Canadian settler colonialism, another that looks specifically at the history of Canadian policies to towards Rohingya refugees in Canada and abroad, and a third that examines the role of policy history in designing contemporary refugee policies in Canada.

I am interested in supervising graduate students in most any area of Canadian politics, but especially with respect to the institutions of Canadian government and public policy making in Canada (whether focused more on specific policy areas or the policy process itself). I am also interested in any topics related to Canadian and comparative citizenship, multiculturalism, immigration, refugee policy, both contemporary and historical.

• “Humanizing Studies of Refuge and Displacement: Considering Complicity, Contingency and Compromise.” Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 37:2, 2021, 70-77.
• “Navigating Diversity: Multiculturalism as a Heuristic.” In R. Mielusal and S. Pruteanu (eds.). Citizenship and Belonging in France and North America. Multicultural Perspectives on Political, Cultural and Artistic Representations of Immigration. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020: 235-54.
• And Dagmar Soennecken. “Taking the Harper Government’s Refugee Policy to Court.” In E. Macfarlane (ed.). Policy Change, Courts, and the Canadian Constitution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018.
• “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Electronic Travel Authorization and the Interdiction of Asylum Seekers at the Canada-U.S. Security Perimeter.” American Review of Canadian Studies 47:4, 2017, 385-407.
• And Rand Dyck. Studying Politics: An Introduction to Political Science [Co-Editor and Contributor, Fifth Edition]. (2015).
• Canadian Liberalism and the Politics of Canadian Border Control, 1867-1967. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013.
• “Restricting Rights, Losing Control: The Politics of Control over Asylum Seekers in Liberal-Democratic States – Lessons from the Canadian Case, 1950-1989.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 43:4, 2010, pp. 937-59.
• “A Long-Standing Canadian Tradition: Citizenship Revocation and Second-Class Citizenship under the Liberals, 1993-2006.” Journal of Canadian Studies 42:3, 2008, pp. 80-105.