Training Forum: Connected, Empowered and Media Literate – Changing the Portrayal of Refugees in the Media

August 13, 2019

Refugee Portrayals in the Media: A history of misrepresentation and misinformation
Discourse: Centering Refugees in Media Coverage
Ingenuity in times of crisis: Refugees use of media and technology
Refugee driven narratives and supporting agency: ways the settlement sector can help
Offline / Online skills: A how to for amplifying and centering refugee narratives
Refugee public campaigns – do they work? a comparative analysis

Bio: Erin Goheen Glanville is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Communication and a Research Associate at the Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities at Simon Fraser University. Her current research is a knowledge mobilization project on the public discourse of contemporary forced migration dialogues in Canada and is done in dialogue with Kinbrace Community Society and other refugee claimant service providers.

7:20 mark on video below.

Bio: Professor Wright serves on UBC’s Vice Presidential Strategic Implementation Committee for Equity and Diversity and on the Mayor of Vancouver’s Black History Month Advisory Committee. Handel Kashope Wright has been variously Canada Research Chair of Comparative Cultural Studies and David Lam Chair of Multicultural Education and is currently Professor of Educational Studies and Director of the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education at the University of British Columbia.

33:00 mark on video below.

Bios: Alia Dharssi is a freelance journalist, researcher and editor based in Vancouver. She has written widely about immigration, refugees, global development and sustainability for Canadian and international media, ranging from the Vancouver Courier to the New York Times. In 2016, Alia spent a year investigating Canadian immigration policy to produce a six-part series for the Calgary Herald and the National Post that revealed ways in which immigration policy is resulting in billions of dollars in losses to the economy each year and highlighted how policies pushed thousands of workers into Canada’s underground economy. As a reporter at The Discourse, Alia helped produce a toolkit for journalists and refugees to help improve coverage of the refugee crisis. Francesca Fionda is a data reporter with the community-engaged journalism organization The Discourse. She’s covered stories about First Nations housing, child welfare and refugees and worked on national investigations with Global News and CBC. She currently lives in Vancouver and is a second-generation Canadian with both parents immigrating to Canada from the Philippines and Italy.

2:06:33 mark on video below.

Bio: Driven by her family’s own lived experiences of war and migration as South Vietnamese refugees, she has a lifelong commitment for refugee rights within an anti-oppression, intersectional and decolonial framework. Thanh currently organizes in the local grassroots community to support queer and trans refugees resettling in Vancouver and in the past, she has organized alongside undocumented migrant workers and past projects have included the creation of free, community ELL classes for undocumented residents. She was also the Co-Chair of the Cultural Communities Advisory Committee with the City of Vancouver whose 2015-2017 term project was researching effective engagement strategies for underrepresented ethno-cultural groups.