Laura Bisaillon

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of health and illness specializing in interpretive methods and the social studies of HIV-related policy and medical inadmissibility in Canadian immigration law. The bulk of my work to date has explored immigration medical inadmissibility decision-making and its consequences. “Screening and Screaming in Exile: Medical Examination and the Immigration Health Work done by People with HIV” is the name of my monograph, currently under review with UBC Press. Since 2013, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran and Romania. I am cross-appointed at OISE in Social Justice Education and the Centre de recherches en éducation franco-ontarienne. I teach 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 

• Research Fellowship, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam, 2020-21
• Visiting Researcher, Brocher Foundation, 2020
• 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.