It’s this reality that drives the work of Professor Jamie Chai Yun Liew, recipient of the 2026 Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Research Award from the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation.
Liew’s research is bringing urgent attention to statelessness while opening space for new approaches grounded in community knowledge, policy change and public understanding.
“As the daughter of a former stateless person, I’m fascinated with how statelessness is created and maintained,” she says. “My research attempts to shed light on how law, legal frameworks and institutions create and maintain statelessness, while ensuring to privilege the perspectives of stateless and former stateless persons, their families and advocates.”
Liew is being recognized both for what she studies and for how she conducts research — collaboratively, ethically and with a focus on the voices of those most directly affected. Her work shows that research can move beyond analyzing inequality to actively reshaping the conditions that produce it.
Creating language, stories and shared understanding
Liew explores statelessness through multiple perspectives and mediums, reaching audiences within academia and far beyond it. A central part of this work is developing language that captures an experience often left unnamed.
She introduced the term “ghost citizen” in her 2024 monograph. It describes how people can live within a state yet remain unrecognized by it. This powerful concept is a bridge between academic analysis and lived experience that resonates across disciplines and audiences.
Liew also turned to fiction to explore dimensions of statelessness. “This provided a sensory and literary depiction of statelessness and migration that legal scholarship alone cannot capture,” she says.
Dandelion (2022) is the story of a woman whose mother disappeared when she was 11. The main character revisits her childhood and travels to Southeast Asia to find out how statelessness shaped her parents’ journey to Canada.
Through this story, Liew creates space for reflection and connection. “So many readers have written to me to share how this story resonates with their own experiences of migration in their families and their communities,” she says. Her novel demonstrates how storytelling can build awareness, empathy and engagement with complex social issues.
Research as collaboration and community action
Collaboration is central to Liew’s work.
As part of a project called the Critical Statelessness Collective, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, she works with scholars from Southeast Asia to better understand how people experience statelessness in different local contexts.
This includes fieldwork in Malaysia’s stateless communities, investigating how mobile courts reach remote groups to secure people’s immigration or citizenship status.
“We’re also developing a project that brings stateless persons into the research process as collaborators,” says Liew. “Using community-based participatory methods, this shifts their role from subjects to co-researchers, strengthening ethical rigour, building trust and producing more meaningful knowledge.”
In the Canadian context, Liew engages with Indigenous scholars’ work, and their practices and ideas around sovereignty movements. She also considers how migrant communities might unintentionally reinforce colonial ideas of citizenship and inclusion while settling.
Liew’s work contributes to ongoing conversations about sovereignty, belonging and coexistence. She has sparked new ways of thinking about citizenship — not simply as a legal status but as a relationship shaped by history, land and community.
From scholarship to real-world impact
“Unpacking the large body of Canadian legislation, policy and case law in immigration and citizenship law is also an important part of my work,” says Liew.
She examines how immigration law shapes the experiences of marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ refugee claimants, women making gender-based claims and families affected by separation. Working closely with legal scholars, practitioners and community clinics, she produces research to inform policy and advance reform.
One such example is her co-authored study Troubling Trends in Canada’s Immigration System Via the Excluded Family Members Regulation: A Survey of Jurisprudence and Lawyers. The Canadian Council for Refugees and other lawyers used this research in advocacy to members of Parliament and the minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship. They sought to address unnecessary legal barriers to family reunification in Canada. These efforts led to a federal pilot program that’s still in place today.
Liew also extends the reach of her research to broader audiences through her award-winning podcast Migration Conversations. In it, migrants, advocates and scholars share insights and lived experiences, helping connect research, policy and public understanding.
This award recognizes both Liew’s research and the creative, collaborative, ethical approach that defines it. She demonstrates how research can be both grounded in scholarship and actively shaping the world beyond it.