Biography
Ali Bhagat is Assistant Professor and Director of the Minor in Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver Campus.
His research investigates refugee/migration policy and racial equity in Europe, Africa, and North America. His recent book Governing the Displaced: Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism (Cornell University Press, 2024) examines urban refugee survival in Paris, France and Nairobi, Kenya. As an international political economist, he is interested in the intersections of race, class, and sexuality and has worked on issues pertaining to LGBTQ+ refugees in particular. His work is based in qualitative methods drawing from interviews, policy analysis, and other ethnographic techniques. He has authored several journal articles in top-ranking journals such as Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy, Antipode, and Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.
Bhagat was recently awarded an SSHRC Insight Development Grant titled ‘Mapping Queer African Refugee Lifepaths’ which investigates the movement of refugees from country of origin to relocation. Bhagat is interested in refugee mobilities, trafficking, livelihoods, community-building, and survival strategies in Canada and South Africa. The main aim of this study is to develop refugee-informed and evidence-based best practices and policies for assisting queer refugees in the global context.
Bhagat is also co-investigator in the Re:Structure Lab, a research and policy lab (Co-Principal Investigators: Genevieve LeBaron and Jessie Brunner) based at the SFU School of Public Policy, Stanford, and Yale Universities.
Along with Genevieve LeBaron (Principal Investigator) and Kam Phung (Co-Investigator), Bhagat is also co-investigator of the SSHRC-funded Insight Grant project The Effectiveness of Worker-Driven Alternatives to Corporate Social Responsibility in Governing Global Supply Chains’. This collaborative project investigates Worker-Driven Social Responsibility (WSR) in the contexts of India, Lesotho, and the US. The team was also awarded an SFU-funded Breaking Barriers grant (Bhagat -Principal Investigator) to examine forced labour in the Okanagan Valley, in British Columbia Canada.
Prior to joining SFU in July 2023, Bhagat held appointments at the University of Manchester and Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. He has written opinion pieces in The Toronto Star and has appeared as an expert on CBC News, CBC News: The National, and CTV News.
Research Interests
- Refugees, Race, Global Displacement, Sexuality and Queer Politics, Labour, Housing, Finance