Internment, Empire, and the Politics of Displacement
Dr. Laura Madokoro’s research examines migration, displacement, and the legacies of empire in refugee history.
This story was originally published in the 2026 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Review.
Dr. Laura Madokoro’s research asks how states define belonging, exclusion, and refuge, and how those definitions are shaped by empire, race, and power. An Associate Professor in the Department of History, her work examines migration, humanitarianism, and settler colonialism, with particular attention to refugee history and human rights.
In 2021, Madokoro received an Ontario Early Researcher Award to begin work on The Disaster Lab, a project exploring the history of disasters, humanitarianism, and migration in Canada, with a focus on what she calls “diasporic disaster citizenship.” Her current research builds on that work, returning to longstanding questions about the politics of refuge and displacement through a project that blends personal history, archival research, and global perspectives on forced migration.
“This new project is about histories of internment and displacement in the context of the Second World War,” Madokoro explains. “Many of these stories, whether it’s the internment of German or Austrian nationals in Europe, or Japanese and Japanese Canadian populations in North America, are often written strictly in national terms. I want to look at them differently.”