International Sociology and International Sociology Reviews

The article Gender-based and intersectional violence in migration and refugee contexts: A contextual global approach by Evangelia Tastsoglou (Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada) & Jane Freedman (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, France) published in International Sociology was shorlisted for the Annual SAGE International Sociology Best Paper Prize’s 2025 edition (Vol. 40) and is available in Open Access. Read on to know more about the authors’ trajectory and work.

Evangelia Tastsoglou & Jane Freedman

Why are you working on this topic? Could you share an experience, a fact or a person who made you get engaged in that research?

E. Tastsoglou: I have been researching immigration and international migration in conjunction with gender through qualitative research into the experiences of immigrant women in Canada and in Greece for most of my career. The research interest in women and violence in the context of migration in particular started in the last 15 years though its origins can be traced back to my first job as a fresh PhD graduate in Sociology. I had been hired as a case worker / counselor for victims of “family violence” at the Greek Orthodox Social Services in Toronto where I stayed for three years. Back then, I did not have sufficient training or the theoretical arsenal to conceptualize the issues I was called to find practical solutions for and offer counsel, but I was inspired, felt committed and vouched to acquire these skills to advocate and perhaps bring about larger change through policy and law.

Do you have any video, recorded conference, or online material that you would like us to share with others?

E. Tastsoglou: We recorded recently a podcast series, based on the GBV-MIG Canada project, that is meant to be released officially for International Women’s Day (March 8). Here is the first episode in the series, in which Dr. Evie Tastsoglou is speaking with one of the Canadian co-investigators, Dr. Lori Wilkinson:

https://chrr.info/resource/gbv-mig-podcast/

What would you emphasize about your academic trajectory? Can you highlight which have been your academic positions, universities, awards, departments and research centers please?

E. Tastsoglou, PhD, LLM, is Full Professor of Sociology, cross-appointed in Political Science and Global Development Studies Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University; a Fellow of the Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence (JMEUCE) at Dalhousie; a Research Fellow of the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre for Family Violence Research of the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton; and a Visiting Professor in the Department of International, European and Area Studies of the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. She has chaired the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Saint Mary’s University (2006-2012) and has served as Coordinator of International Development Studies (2017-2021). She has also served as president of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association (2018-2022); president of the Research Committee on Women in Society of the International Sociological Association (2010-2014), and elected member of the International Sociological Association’s Research Council (2014-2018). She was the recipient of the Saint Mary’s University President’s Award for Excellence in Research (2020); the “Sociologist of the Month” Current Sociology, SAGE Publishers (July 2018).

She was the recipient of the Fulbright/Niarchos “Greek Diaspora Fellowship” in 2017 in the Department of Sociology at the University of Crete, Greece.

With sociological and legal training and a feminist intersectional perspective Evangelia Tastsoglou’s research has focused on International Migration; Canadian Immigration and Integration; Gender, Migration and Citizenship; Violence in Migration and Refugee Contexts; Immigrant Women; Gender-Based Violence in Migration; Diasporas. With over 120 publications, Tastsoglou’s research has appeared in national and international peer-reviewed journals and books. She has recently authored /co-authored /co-edited Gender-Based Violence in Migration: Interdisciplinary, Feminist and Intersectional Approaches. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022; Gender and the Continuum of Violence in Migration, special themed collection in Frontiers in Sociology, 2024 -2026 (Open Access); Gender and Violence in a Migration and Refugee Context: Agency, Resilience and Resistance, special issue of Canadian Ethnic Studies, Vol. 55.3, 2023; Gender, Violence and Forced Migration, special themed collection in Frontiers in Human Dynamics – Refugees and Conflict. 2021 (Open Access); and Interrogating Gender, Violence, and the State in National and Transnational Contexts. Special Volume of Current Sociology Monograph Series (Sage), Vol. 64, No 4, Monograph 2, 2016, https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/csia/64/4. She was the PI of the Canadian inter-university team of researchers in the multi-year CIHR-funded project “Violence against Women Migrants and Refugees: Analyzing Causes and Effective Policy Response.” (2019-2025; https://smu.ca/gendernet/welcome.html). This project was part of an international one funded by GenderNet Plus of the European Horizon 2020, consisting of a consortium of research teams from seven countries.

For more details see: https://www.smu.ca/sociology/sc-faculty-staff-profiles-evangelia.html; Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6679-2747; Google Scholar: https://tinyurl.com/y9hk3uy7; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelia_Tastsoglou.