Dr. Shauna Labman is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba, where she teaches immigration & refugee law, international law, legal systems, graduate theory & methodology, as well as, on occasion, torts. In April 2016, she was named one of CBC Manitoba’s Future 40 for her refugee work and advocacy (a recognition for which she was nominated by her former colleague Professor Debra Parkes, now the Chair in Feminist Legal Studies at Allard School of Law).
Shauna pursued her graduate studies at the Allard School of Law following positions as a consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in New Delhi and with the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, as well as with the Law Commission of Canada, the Workers’ Compensation Board of British Columbia, the Nunavut Court of Justice and as a law clerk at the Federal Court of Appeal.
Having worked on both status determinations and resettlement referrals for refugees in India, Shauna wanted more clarity on the theory behind refugee resettlement and its relationship to asylum. Working with her supervisor Dr. Catherine Dauvergne, she completed her LLM in 2007 and continued on to complete her PhD in 2012. Her doctoral project examined the intersection of international rights, responsibility and obligation in the absence of a legal scheme for refugee resettlement. Shauna’s LLM and PhD were both supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and from 2008 to 2012 she was a Trudeau Scholar with the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation – a recognition awarded to only 15 Canadian and foreign doctoral candidates each year. At UBC, Shauna was also recognized as a Liu Scholar through the Liu Institute for Global Issues. Combining forces and funding with Liu and Trudeau colleagues, Shauna co-organized a conference series examining the meaning of Canadian citizenship on Canada’s three coastlines with events in Vancouver, Halifax and Iqaluit in 2010-2011.
Having returned to her hometown of Winnipeg and for her position at Robson Hall in 2013, Shauna now works to create relationships between academics, students and community organizations. She is on the board of directors with the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba. She co-founded the Migration Law Research Cluster at Robson Hall, which launched with the Building Connections: Refugee Research and Community Outreach conference in 2014 and continues to bring in monthly speakers. Recently, she took part in UofM’s Visionary Conversation on refugees, spoke at the American Bar Association Section of International Law fall meeting and was an organizer of the 2016 Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies conference. She has presented her work across Canada as well as in Australia, Egypt, Germany, Israel, and the United States. Her published work covers questions of human rights, discrimination, refugee protection, gender and resettlement and is increasingly focused on the government-citizen dynamic in private refugee sponsorship. Her most recent publication is “Private Sponsorship: Complementary or Conflicting Interests?” (2016) 32:2 Refuge 67-80.”
Shauna’s son Hugo was born near the end of her PhD in 2011 and her daughter Yael was born one year into her job in 2014.
