Laura Madokoro

Assistant Professor, History and Classical Studies McGill University

  • Montreal QC

Laura's research focuses on the history of race, refugees and religious and secular humanitarianism.

Contact

Biography

Laura is a historian of global migration whose research explores the history of refugees, race and humanitarianism.

She is the author of Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2016), which looks at how race influenced the character of the international refugee regime with particular attention to how it shaped the migration and resettlement of Chinese refugees to British white settler societies during the cold war.

Laura's work has also appeared in a variety of international and national academic journals including the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Canadian Historical Review, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association and the Urban History Review.

Her current research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, investigates the history of sanctuary in North America from the 19th-century to the present. The project explores how secular and religious offers of sanctuary enforced notions of deserving recipients and challenged the authority and legitimacy of the nation-state.

Industry Expertise

Education/Learning
Research

Areas of Expertise

Refugee and Human Rights Issues
Immigration
Canadian History
Archives
Heritage
Race Relations
Global Migration
Humanitaranism
Sanctuary

Education

University of British Columbia

Ph.D.

History

2012

University of Toronto

M.A.

History

2000

Languages

  • English
  • French

Media Appearances

Lessons from the Japanese Canadian internments: Policies built on fear won’t make us safer

The Globe and Mail  

2016-01-19

Jan. 19 is an ignominious and little-known landmark on the Canadian calendar. It was on this date in 1943 that Canadian politicians authorized the forced sale of all of the homes, businesses, farms and possessions of Japanese Canadians who had been uprooted from coastal British Columbia in the previous year under the pretext of national security. The lives of affected Japanese Canadians would never be the same.

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Vietnam’s boat people: How four families found refuge in B.C.

The Province  

2015-10-04

“It was the first time that a refugee settlement process happened with significant private sponsorship,” says McGill University history professor Laura Madokoro ...

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Vote Compass: Green, NDP supporters most open to accepting more refugees

CBC News  

2015-09-14

Laura Madokoro, a professor in the department of history and classical studies at McGill University with an expertise in refugee history, says there's always some reluctance to encourage the movement of people across national borders ...

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Articles

Transactions and Trajectories: The Social Life of Chinese Migrant Photographs

Photography and Culture

2015

Beginning in the 1880s, the New Zealand Collector of Customs required Chinese migrants temporarily departing the country to submit an identifying photograph to its custody and control. Migrants carried a duplicate copy with them to China and would present themselves, and their copy of the photograph, upon their return to New Zealand to regain entry and avoid paying a punitive poll tax more than once.

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Handprints in the Archives: Exploring the Emotional Life of the State

Social History

2015

Using Certificates of Exemption issued by the government of Australia from 1901 to 1958, this article explores how official immigration records can be used to document the emotional life of the state. As part of the government’s efforts to discourage Asian migrants from settling permanently in Australia, the 1901 Immigration Act required new arrivals to pass a dictation test in order to be admitted.

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Surveying Hong Kong in the 1950s: Western Humanitarians and the ‘Problem’ of Chinese Refugees

Modern Asian Studies

2015

At the end of the Second World War, there were over a million displaced persons and refugees in Europe alone. Hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted with the expansion of the Japanese empire across the Pacific Theater, and many others were similarly displaced when Japan was defeated. Others later fled civil conflicts, in South Asia, for instance, and in China, where thousands left the mainland during the final days of the Chinese Civil War. Among this massive displacement in Asia, unlike in Europe, only a few groups were identified as refugees.

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