Campus
- Scarborough (UTSC)
Cross-Appointments
Fields of Study
- Culture & History
- Policy & Planning
- Social & Political Geography
- Urban
Areas of Interest
- Political geographies of migration and displacement;
- Border studies;
- Geographies of detention, political asylum, and war resistance;
- Island studies;
- Methodologies and migration;
- Feminist, queer histories of geography
Biography
My research explores how people cross borders, access asylum, survive detention, resist war, and create safe havens. I advise student research on migration and displacement, borders, and political and feminist geographies. Transnational research on migration means that I work in many regions of the world. Current SSHRC-funded work examines shifting geographies of asylum-seeking, landscapes and policies of protection, and resettlement of refugees in North America from remote islands in the Pacific - a project called Asylum’s Afterlives. I also direct a new lab called Haven: The Asylum Lab, designed to preserve and provide access to migration-related data. I love to write, and am also interested in the mobilization of knowledge through art. Filmmaker Lisa Molomot and I recently collaborated to make a feature-length documentary about two generations of US war resisters who moved to Canada in search of protection. SAFE HAVEN (2020) is available on Kanopy and New Day: https://www.newday.com/films/safe-haven.
Before moving to U of T, I was on faculty at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University's Balsillie School for International Affairs. I held a Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at Laurier and the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professorship of Canadian Studies at Harvard University. My work has been funded by the Canada Research Chair in Global Migration, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Canadian Embassy, the US National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. I am a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
Publications
Mountz, A & K Williams (2023) Let geography die: the rise, fall, and “unfinished business” of geography at Harvard. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2023.2208645
Mountz, A (2020) The death of asylum: hidden geographies of the enforcement archipelago. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Loyd, J and A Mountz (2018) Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Mountz, A (2011) The enforcement archipelago: detention, haunting, and asylum on islands. Political Geography 30(3): 118-128.
Mountz, A (2010) Seeking asylum: human smuggling and bureaucracy at the border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.