Laura Bisaillon

During my stay, we discovered the three of us share an interest in political borders and countering the harshness and violence that state borders impose. As artists and writers, we also share similar approaches when confronting these issues.

In my scholarly work and installation art practice, I look at how migrants and people with illness and disability experience social and material disadvantage and harms systemically over time.

Khosravi and Jahandoost bring literature, performing arts and new media together to express Iranian society, with all its complexities. One of the key things about all of our practices is that we produce narratives – alternative to the mainstream – about the people and places we know.

For the past three years, we have been collaborating on a project, We Beyond Borders, that debuted in Tehran in May.

Bahareh Jahandoost, the performing artist and educator in action (photo by Mehdi Khosravi, author provided)

We Beyond Borders explores answers to questions of universal concern: What is it like and what does it mean to be human in the 21^stcentury? What does life feel like every day for people who walk in different shoes?

The idea seems simple, but it is subversive, too, since the project puts people’s everyday experiences at the centre. These experiences include people’s (our) effort and hard work navigating and resisting the physical and emotional discomfort that borders make us endure.

We intend to spark a soft-edged revolution through storytelling and performance, while connecting the ancient and contemporary.

We Beyond Borders

At the project’s launch, Jahandoost assumed centre stage as a Naqqal, Persian for storyteller.

Jahandoost has been involved in theatre since she was seven years old, and she trained with the renowned Iranian Naqqal, Morshed Vali-Allah Torabi. Using the traditional form of narrating stories through Naqqali theatre, she has performed in China, France, Hungary, India, Italy, Russia and Turkey.

She says: “I perform publicly by narrating epic stories sourced in classical literature and folk texts. These are popular and widely known and appreciated throughout Iran…The most fabulous and famous piece of Persian literature is Shahnameh…It is an immensely rich source of seemingly countless tales – both of love (Manijeh) and tragedy (Tahmineh). I interpret stories using my body: gesticulating and moving, theatrically. What I do educates, entertains and enlivens peoples’ imaginations and spirits…I experience profound joy seeing people moved by stories I perform.”

As a Naqqal, Jahandoost regularly appears on the radio, and she is also the star of a television program for young people that airs across Iran. “Something delightful is that more and more young people are interested in traditional storytelling.”

Telling stories has the potential to cultivate and craft a future where we can imagine people relating to each other with empathy. “The world over, people can be and are inspired by stories,” says Jahandoost.

The ancient meets new technology

With We Beyond Borders, we aim both to spark new and support existing interest among people who want to know how to connect the ancient with the present, and to learn from these continuities. As Jahandoost says, “Nature and ancient and old wisdom are within us, or can be reclaimed. The want to be transported beyond what we know, into other realms, is a shared human impulse. The religious person may seek to be heaved toward Heaven. The spiritual person may seek to be inspired by the sensual.”

In the past decade, state media in Iran have given Naqqali a high profile by investing in opportunities for it to be broadcast on television and heard on the radio. Part of the reason is that Naqqali is listed in UNESCO’s repertory of endangered cultural resources in Iran.

Although Khosravi believes this is a positive trend, he says “the best and necessary place for this genre is live, in theatre form, done in front of, for, and among living and breathing people. Its promise and transformative capability are realized when experienced in person.”

Yet, Khosravi still believes Naqqali can co-exist in two forms: performing for an audience and performing for a lens or microphone. The forms do not have to compete, he says.

We Beyond Borders' Tehran TV Performance (photo by Mehdi Khosravi, provided by author)

Jahandoost, as a television and radio personality, understands this issue as well because it presents an interesting dilemma for her work. She agrees that we must question and reflect on the “gains and losses through our interactions with technology and our relations to each other.”

Thanks to new media, people everywhere have access to her work, she says. This new access means that people globally can learn about others “in defiance to national borders that hem them, as their and our way of talking back to borders.”

We Beyond Borders plans to perform to Canadian audiences soon, and is looking for venues to do so. In juxtaposition to ancient and historic audiences who were the first to experience performances of The Shahnameh (the story of kings), big swaths of Iran’s resident population today are highly literate and highly educated. This includes the country’s sizeable diaspora arts communities throughout the world.

Since our global borders and bordering practices are troubled and troubling, and no more so than for mobile, migrant and immobile people whose struggles lie at the heart of We Beyond Borders, we endeavour to inspire and transform.

We begin where we stand: Among our students and interested members of the general public in Iran, Canada and places in between and beyond.

In particular, audiences of young women, for until recently, Naqqali was performed and seen by men in streets and coffee houses in Iran. Today, however, the possibility of being a Naqqal is open to everyone in Iranian society, and so there are women narrators such as Jahandoost, who says, “I am very aware of how gender shapes my work, and I am also aware that I am a role model to younger women who might, after seeing me perform, feel inspired by the simple fact of seeing me in a lead role…When young women encounter a woman telling ancient Persian stories, they might imagine themselves standing in the very same position. This is thrilling!”

Laura Bisaillon is an assistant professor in health studies at the 91�Թ� Scarborough.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Finally, some changes to health-based discrimination in Canadian immigration law

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 14 May 2018 20:09:56 +0000

Finally, some changes to health-based discrimination in Canadian immigration law

noreen.rasbach Mon, 05/14/2018 - 16:09

Cutline

A rally on March 12 at York University called for the repeal of Section 38-1-C (photo by Laura Bisaillon)

Topic

Research & Innovation

91�Թ� Scarborough

Subheadline

The Conversation with 91�Թ�'s Laura Bisaillon

As it stands, there is health-based discrimination in Canadian law. The system disadvantages the diseased and disabled.

Restrictions preventing people with disease and physical or mental challenges from permanently immigrating are longstanding features of how Canadian borders have been and are enforced. Applicants for permanent immigration are ineligible if state-employed physicians anticipate their care and treatment to be above $6,655 a year.

On April 16, federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen announced that there will be three adjustments to Section 38-1-C of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), the section of the law that deals with “medical inadmissibility due to excessive demand.”

The three changes are:

The financial threshold for excluding applicants was increased to $20,000 a year.
Speculated future cost of care on public social services no longer applies.
Applicants with certain health conditions might now find it possible to permanently immigrate.

For years in Canada there has been collective mobilization to repeal Section 38-1-C. To date, there have also been two Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ challenges aimed at eradicating health-based discrimination in Canadian immigration law.

Work on this issue has accounted for thousands of working hours for persons directly affected by exclusions, their allies and civil servants. In late 2017, a government standing committee recommended that medical inadmissibility within the IRPA be repealed.

Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Ahmed Hussen stands during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa on May 7 (photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

While the government of Canada publicly agreed with this position, it decided against full repeal. The country is thus not compliant with its domestic and international human rights obligations, including Article 18 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which deals with human mobility.

My decade of researching and teaching about medical inadmissibility has been illuminating. I have learned that we teach immigration history so poorly that year after year, students arrive in my classes unfamiliar about how the Canadian immigration system works.

This is not entirely surprising because the system is an immense bureaucracy. We know that bureaucracies are organizationally perplexing for all, even for people working within them.

Immigrating to Canada is an expensive, time-consuming and emotionally high-stakes investment.

Respecting human rights is good policy

Less frequently addressed in headlines is that the immigration system provides a steady source of income for professionals inside and outside Canada. Lawyers, doctors and administrators benefit from a system that is simultaneously opaque and structured to depend on their professions. In fact, removing Section 38-1-C would curtail sizeable and ongoing legal, medical and administrative costs.

Newcomers to Canada with whom I have talked about medical inadmissibility are animated when discussing their experiences with lawyers and doctors associated with the immigration system. However, the public is generally poorly informed about how the system works, including how much money it costs people to immigrate.

Ethical and moral forms of reasoning chronically have a hard time competing with economic imperatives. But for a fiscally concerned Canadian public interested in weighing in on anticipated future costs of caring for and treating people, whether immigrants or otherwise, we must remember to see whose interests are served by the current law.

That is, we must not reinforce the binaries of economic imperatives and morality. They are false. Respecting human rights and working for social justice are and have been shown, time and again, to be sound public social and health policy-making. Furthermore, people with disease and disability contribute to all societies everywhere in qualitatively and quantitatively measurable ways. This is indisputable.

We might stop and reflect on the circumstances of our own families. We are endowed with road maps for how to quantify human contributions.

Take, for instance, domestic labour. Work in the home is taken for granted unless we make it visible. Seeking to make gendered work count in market terms led to New Zealand public policy professor Marilyn Waring becoming a pioneer in feminist economics. Her research shows not only how to monetize domestic labour, but also convincingly argues that tallies of a country’s national revenue are imprecise unless domestic labour contributions are incorporated.

Rethinking health and illness

New lines of advocacy for repealing the IRPA Section 38-1-C are needed. Within disability studies, ideas about people with disease and disability, who have long been portrayed as “other” and as vulnerable, have been eclipsed and replaced by more accurate conceptions.

Looking at health and illness as tentative, conditional, as a matter of geography, is helpful. For one thing, this compels us to reflect on how we think and talk about people with disease and disability. It channels us towards a reflexive stance, and offers us the opportunity to consider how we all experience vulnerability.

New approaches to assessing immigrant applications are needed. First, the diseased and disabled should not be pre-judged or ruled out for admission to Canada based on economic assessments alone; instead, their vulnerability should be considered a skill and a coveted source of strength.

In this way of thinking, vulnerability is tantamount with “openness, susceptibility and receptiveness,” not with weakness.

For example, refugee applicants, in particular, settle after enduring and overcoming chronic existential uncertainty and protracted material depravity. They have acquired skills that make them resilient and hard-working.

These are exactly the human attributes that Canada wants in prospective immigrants through its immigration program. Going forward, most Canadians will have settled in Canada using the immigration system.

The Canadian public surely must be curious about how immigration works. We should know more about what our fellow Canadians had to do permanently settle here. We have much to learn from would-be immigrants and their experiences.

What are next steps? Collective action to repeal the IRPA Section 38-1-C will continue. We will resume generating scholarly and experiential evidence to support a full repeal. It is not a matter of if a full repeal will happen, but rather when this will occur.

Laura Bisaillon is an assistant professor of health studies at 91�Թ� Scarborough.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A ray of hope on World AIDS Day for Canadian immigrants

rasbachn — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 15:45:38 +0000

A ray of hope on World AIDS Day for Canadian immigrants rasbachn Fri, 12/01/2017 - 10:45

Cutline

Candles are placed around an AIDS symbol on World AIDS Day in Quezon city, Philippines in 2016. (photo by Aaron Favila/AP)

Topic

Subheadline

The Conversation with 91�Թ�'s Laura Bisaillon

It’s World AIDS Day and this year, I am moving beyond remembering loved ones. I am shifting to a forward position and a distinct political hopefulness.

My wish on this World AIDS Day is for Canada to change how HIV is dealt with in its immigration system. Specifically, I would like to see the nation change how it makes inadmissibility decisions about people with HIV who apply to live in Canada.

This would be done through the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. It would involve changing specific institutional practices, including the collection and circulation of HIV-related data from prospective immigrants.

The imperative for my research is to demystify social institutions like immigration so that we can explore and understand how things happen. As an interdisciplinary professor in health and social justice, and as a former social worker in a woman’s sexual health communitiy, I work to detect institutionally arising inequities.

For the past 15 years, I have been involved in AIDS work. I have worked in the Horn of Africa and parts of Canada in direct support. My life and lives of people I care about, some of whom cannot immigrate to Canada because of their HIV status, are deeply affected by this infection and its unfortunate pernicious social standing. I work with teams to use creativity and critique in equal measure to produce do-able ideas for remedying some of these inequities.

Using creativity and critique

This is precisely what I have done for Canada’s mandatory immigration HIV testing policy. The policy was enacted in 2002, but not ever reviewed until my work.

The policy acts as a filter. It screens for HIV and sorts people with HIV out (with some exceptions). HIV is discovered in the medical examination that all applicants for permanent residency must undergo at regular intervals. Most of these exams happen outside of Canada in contexts that Canada cannot monitor.

My motivation for assessing how this policy functions in everyday lives was because of the disconnect between immigrant people’s everyday social experiences through Canada’s imposed HIV testing, and the official representations of these experiences.

I formed alliances with racialized women with HIV from the Global South coming through the Canadian refugee ajudication system. Through them, I learned of the contrast between what actually happened in their lives with immigration medical processes and what is officially understood to have happened as documented in national government reports.

I set out to understand how this dissonance was happening. All persons aged 15 years and older who request Canadian permanent residence, such as refugees and immigrants, are required to undergo HIV testing. Tuberculosis and syphilis are the two other conditions for which people receive mandatory screening.

I produced the first social science exploration and critique of the medical, legal and administrative context governing the immigration to Canada for people with HIV. I identified both inequities and levers for change by using a feminist ethnographic policy analysis.

An immigration HIV test catalyzes the state’s collection of medical data about an applicant. These are entered into state decision-making about the person’s inadmissibility to Canada.

The good news on HIV policy

As it turns out, the HIV policy and mandatory screening ushers in a set of institutional practices that are highly problematic for prospective immigrants with HIV infection, the Canadian state and what is means to be Canadian more broadly. Avoidable inequities have been happening for 16 years, and they are ongoing.

The good news is that policies can be adjusted.

People with disease and disability, and their advocates, recently met with Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen to discuss and plan a future course of action.

And we have recently learned that Hussen has said “current medical inadmissibility rules for newcomers are out of touch with Canadian values and need to be reformed.”

Canada’s Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen says current medical inadmissibility rules for newcomers are out of touch with Canadian values and need to be reformed (photo by Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

It was acknowledged that the ways in which medical inadmissibility decision-making is informed and practised are outdated. This certainly applies to HIV/AIDS, a chronic and manageable disease and an episodic disability, in the Canadian context.

We see that HIV infection is scrutinized more and differently than any other health condition through the immigration process, where we see layers of institutional directives, guidelines and practices in place governing HIV/AIDS. A core problem with the HIV testing policy is that it’s not informed by or reliant upon the most up-to-date scientific knowledge..

Democracy depends on how we talk to each other. Research on the social determinants of health shows us that we all live better lives in egalitarian societies. Part of how to achieve such societies is how we talk and listen to each other.

What sort of public spaces can we create to hear and be heard on matters related to the Canadian immigration system and medical inadmissibility decision-making? Opportunities are preciously few.

A roundtable on immigration and disease is needed

I propose a roundtable on immigration, disease and disability in which I bring to the table the most up-to-date scientific knowledge about immigration and HIV. We could invite Harvard’s Professor Michael Sandel to join, because he also asks critically important questions about immigration (and sparks debate to collectively contemplate answers), as well as my colleagues at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. When can we meet to discuss immigration and HIV?

The World AIDS Day flag flies on Parliament Hill in Ottawa last Dec. 1 (photo by Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

Together in class, students and I have used the research record to examine the human rights implications of mandatory immigration HIV testing in Canada. We have done the same regarding the ethical and material consequences of medical doctors being asked to work in ethical problematic ways within Canada’s immigration system.

Just as other immigrants to Canada do, those with HIV will contribute to our society in myriad ways. Having interacted with thousands upon thousands of people with HIV over time and across space and place, they are among the most resilient and hard-working people I have met, which I attribute to the experience of personal suffering and knowledge of the larger social and political history of HIV/AIDS, not to mention their place within it.

This is precisely the sort of immigrant that Canada wants and indeed welcomes.

I am committed to a process in which we can talk with and listen to each other on matters of immigration and disease as they relate to HIV/AIDS. The moment is upon us to work with the most up-to-date scientific evidence to produce a medical inadmissibility decision-making system unfettered by inducing harm.

Laura Bisaillon is an assistant professor in the health studies program of the department of anthropology at the 91�Թ� Scarborough.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.