Laura Bisaillon

My career has been dedicated to social research, services, care and activism. As a university professor and qualitative sociologist, I work on the social production and organization of knowledge about migration, health and the state. I publish in various formats, including book, article, prose, blog, film, photo and art exhibit. Since 2013, I have carried out institutional ethnographic fieldwork in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran and Romania. The bulk of my work to date has explored HIV-related policy in Canadian immigration law. “Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience” is my monograph that will appear in 2022 with the University of British Columbia Press. My graduate appointment is at OISE’s Department of Social Justice Education and the Centre de recherches en éducation franco-ontarienne. I am fluent in English and French and supervise undergraduate and graduate students in English and French.

PhD (Ottawa), MUP (McGill), BA (Bishop’s), CEP (Strasbourg III)

HIV/AIDS, Horn of Africa, immigration policies and politics, institutional ethnography, medical inadmissibility, migration, social organization of knowledge, sociology of health and illness 

• Visiting Researcher, Brocher Foundation, 2022
• Research Fellowship, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam, 2020-21
• Best Staff and Faculty Award: Scarborough Campus Students’ Union, 2018-19
• Visiting Professor, University of Bucharest, 2018
• Visiting Researcher, Brocher Foundation, 2017 
• Senior Academic Fellow, Comparative Program on Health and Society, 2014-15
• Connaught New Researcher, University of Toronto, 2014
• Best Dissertation in Canada, Canadian Association for Graduate Studies, 2013
• Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal, University of Ottawa, 2012
• Joseph De Konink Prize, Best Interdisciplinary Dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2012

(Selected)

• Bisaillon, L., Cattapan, A., Driessen, A., van Duin, E., Anton, L., Spruit, S., & Jecker, N. 2020. Doing Academia Differently: ‘Needing Self-help Less than a Fair Society’. Feminist Studies, 46(1), 130-157.
• Bisaillon, L., Montange, L., Zambenedetti, A., Frasca, P., El-Shamy, L., & Arviv, T. 2019. Everyday Geographies, Geographies in the Everyday: Mundane of Mobilities Made Visible. ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies, 18(4): 1025-1053. 
• Bisaillon, L. 2019 (Sept.1). Becoming Migration Researchers: Disquieting Borders with Auto-Ethnography. ALIGN Alternative Global Network Media Lab, 2 [on-line].
• Bisaillon, L. 2019. On and in my Body. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 191(29): E818-19.
• Bisaillon, L., & Sanders, C. 2019 (Mar. 29). Searching, Studying and Doing Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands. Somatosphere. [on-line]
• Bisaillon, L. 2018. Personae non Gratae. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 7(1): 167-168.
• Sanders, C., & Bisaillon, L. 2018. When Health Care is Displaced by State Interests: Building Dialogue through Shared Findings. Qualitative Health Research, 29(1), 32-41.
• Bisaillon, L. 2018 (May 13). Finally, Some Changes to Health-based Discrimination in Canadian Immigration Law. The Conversation [on-line]
• Bisaillon, L., Hassan, M., & Hassan, M. 2017. Committing Sociology: Being Healthy, Happy, and Up-High in St. James Town. Health Tomorrow: Interdisciplinarity and Internationality, 5, 107-132.
• Ng, S., Bisaillon, L., & Webster, F. 2017. Blurring the Boundaries: Using Institutional Ethnography to Inquire into Health Professions Education and Practice. Medical Education, 51, 51-60.
• Mykhalovskiy, E., Hastings, C., Sanders, C., Hayman, M., & Bisaillon, L. 2016. ‘Callous, Cold and Deliberately Duplicitous’: Racialization, Immigration and the Representation of HIV Criminalization in Canadian Mainstream Media. Report funded by the CIHR Social Research Centre for HIV Prevention.
• Bisaillon, L., Gooshki, E., & Briskman, L. 2016. Medico-legal Borders and the Shaping of Health Services for Afghans in Iran: Physical, Social, Bureaucratic and Public Health Conditions of Care. International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 2(1), 40-58.
• Bisaillon, L. 2014. Introduction: The Politics of Practice and the Contradictions for People, Policy and Providing Care: Investigations Into the Implications of Health Work Organized Within State Interests. Public Health Ethics, 7(3), 225-228.