The fourth episode of Research Chat features Allison Petrozziello, a feminist migration researcher and human rights advocate who is pursuing a PhD in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and is affiliated with the International Migration Research Centre. A specialist in gender, migration, human rights, and development, she will speak about her research on the exclusion of migrant and refugees’ children from birth registration and how it creates a risk of statelessness.
The episode features:
Allison Petrozziello Research Chat S1E4
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
migration, birth, registration, people, practices, women, global, dominican republic, rights, feminist, children, haitian descent, nationality, document, state, identity, laurier, gender, research, birth certificate
SPEAKERS
Allison Petrozziello, Shawna Reibling
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Shawna Reibling 00:04
Welcome to Research Chat, a podcast where students share their experiences at Wilfrid Laurier University and their current research findings. I'm your guide Shawna Reibling, a Knowledge Mobilization Officer at Laurier and in each episode, I will interview a Laurier student who is exploring a specific research passion through their graduate research work.
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Shawna Reibling
Welcome. Thank you for talking to me today Allison.
Allison Petrozziello
Good morning Shawna. Thanks for inviting me to be on this new Laurier podcast. It's great that you're highlighting graduate students' work.
Shawna Reibling
So, first I want to ask you some questions about your experience at Laurier. What program are you studying?
Allison Petrozziello
My name is Allison Petrozziello. I'm in the PhD program in Global Governance which is offered at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and that's a joint program between Laurier and the University of Waterloo.
Shawna Reibling
Who are your supervisors?
Allison Petrozziello
I have a stellar committee of feminist migration scholars who are helping me sharpen my thinking. Dr. Jenna Hennebry is my supervisor and she's co founder of the International Migration Research Centre 9IMRC), which is also based at the Balsillie School. And then on my committee, I'm also working with two geographers Dr. Margaret Walton Roberts, who co founded the IMRC with Jenna and Dr. Alison Mountz who is the current director of the IMRC and she holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Migration.
Shawna Reibling
Why did you choose the Global Governance doctoral program at the Balsillie School?
Allison Petrozziello
Well, before coming to Canada, I spent about eight years in the Dominican Republic where I was combining consulting work on gender and migration with UN Women and research with a local think tank called the Caribbean Migrants Observatory (OBMICA) for its name in Spanish. And I met Laurier Professor Jenna Hennebry through my UN Women consulting work. So she and I were both collaborating as part of a global project on women migrant workers rights and I was in charge of the capacity building component and Dr. Hennebry was leading the international research component. In 2015 she came to a global training of trainers which I was organizing in Santo Domingo and I expressed interest in doing a PhD and she said there's nowhere else in the world except for with me and Canada and she was right.
Shawna Reibling
How has your experience in the doctoral program influenced you personally and professionally? It sounds like it emerged out of a personal connection.
Allison Petrozziello
Oh, it did. Believe me pivoting mid career, with a partner and two small children in tow, to move to another country and pursue a PhD has been no small feat. Working with Jenna my other committee members, as well as inspiring scholars such as Rianne Mahon, Carol Duncan and Jasmine Habib has given me the confidence and support I needed to grow personally at this moment in my life.
Professionally, I found a wonderful intellectual home amongst the interdisciplinary scholars at the Balsillie School. We come from different disciplines and backgrounds but, I would say that what unites us is an intellectual drive to examine the most pressing cross border issues of our time, such as migration and climate change and a political commitment to contribute to global solutions.
Shawna Reibling
How has your affiliation with the IMRC influenced your research and graduate experience at Laurier?
Allison Petrozziello
I am learning with and from the vibrant community of professors and student researchers affiliated with the International Migration Research Centre. I'm a graduate student board member of the IMRC at an exciting time when the centre has been attracting more visiting researchers and has an extensive research portfolio on many different aspects of global migration. I also appreciate the intellectual community of feminist thinkers who are helping me to have a critical vision or analysis of the ways in which systemic inequalities are present in human mobility in all its forms.
I've also received a lot of support from the IMRC and the Faculty of Grad Studies and as contract faculty myself at Laurier, to be able to grow my networks by participating in international conferences. As a result, I now belong to a global network of PhDs on statelessness, ACUNS which is the Academic Council on the UN System, the Academic Council on the Global Compact for Migration as well as, the Association of Women's Rights and Development.
Shawna Reibling
What practices have you found helpful on your educational journey?
Allison Petrozziello
Teaching! I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to teach undergrad students at Laurier in the Political Science and Women and Gender Studies programs and I say that there's no better way to learn than to teach. I learn with my students and I teach other practices. I meditate to keep myself grounded. I read widely and early in the morning, and I also put it down wholly and completely so I can parent my two children. I recently read a piece by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg talking about when she was going through law school and how combining the two things is a challenge but how parenting and doing your intellectual work can balance each other out.
Shawna Reibling
And before she went to law school her father-in-law said, Ruth you need to put down the guilt and just do it if you're going to do it.
Allison Petrozziello
I've done away with the guilt. I try to be fully present and what I'm doing at the current moment and my daughters are watching me grow as well. And they're starting to see me not just as mommy but as a person who has her own political and intellectual projects and and who's also present for them.
Shawna Reibling
That's a great example.
Allison Petrozziello
It's not easy on a day to day basis. But I am definitely inspired by, again, the professors I'm working with who are doing this in their own lives as well.
Shawna Reibling
You are a gender and migration scholar whose focus is now turning towards citizenship rights and statelessness. Could you help us connect the dots between these issues?
Allison Petrozziello
Sure, yes. At this point, I have a series of keywords to describe my research interests. My keywords right now are gender, migration, development, human rights, statelessness and so how to connect the dots? Well, I would say that studying gender is about power, and about understanding power relations and how they manifest in a different levels in our interpersonal lives. You know, at a micro level at a meso level, looking at labour markets, looking at institutions, and how those power relations play out creating opportunities, granting resources to certain individuals over others. And at a macro level, looking at international systems to govern human mobility, for example. So gender is an analytic, that helps me think about power and how it manifests at those different levels.
So migration is one example of a phenomenon but migration governance, the ways the institutions involved and the ideas around who should be able to move under what conditions where, and protection. And that leads to a rights focus, right? So taking the Human Rights based approach to the study of gender and migration helps us to see whose rights are being protected, who is able to move regularly in a regular fashion, and who is not. Whose rights are being violated and how.
And statelessness is an example of a human rights violation that I've come to focus on in recent years, because it violates the human right to a nationality. And so people who move under different kinds of conditions may or may not be able to access a nationality in the place where they live, or the place where their children are born.
Shawna Reibling
And these issues are really linked as part of the pressing issues of our time, I think it would be very difficult to separate out all those keywords and examine them.
Allison Petrozziello
Oh, for sure. I mean, and and I could keep adding to them. I'm learning a lot from anti-racist scholars, from those who are working on from post-colonial and decolonial perspective, to think about gender in a way that's not just about men and women are about gender identity, but also thinking about other forms of power relations based on race based on ethnicity.
At this point, I'm applying an intersectional feminist analytic to to these issues. So it just keeps going deeper, as I'm trying to take a historically informed view of the problems that we see in the present day and to think about alternative futures as well.
Shawna Reibling
Your doctoral work explores what you call birth registration as bordering practice. And can you explain what you mean by this?
Allison Petrozziello
So, I mentioned that, before coming to Canada, I was working in the Dominican Republic. In addition to the UN consulting work, I was working with a local think tank called Caribbean Migrants Observatory, or (OBMICA). And one of the research projects that I collaborated on was looking at the gender dimensions of statelessness. So there's a large population of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic, who were brought over as migrant workers 100 years ago or later, when the US was occupying both sides of the island of Hispaniola, so Haiti and Dominican Republic, for those of you who don't know they share an island in the Caribbean. So many of the descendants of those guest workers who were brought over are in fact stateless. The Dominican government does not recognise them as nationals of their country and Haiti doesn't either. And so one of the research projects I coordinated for Caribbean Migrants Observatory (OBMICA), tried to look at when we take a gender lens or gender analytic and look at this statelessness problem that's affecting people of Haitian descent.
What can we see? And so one of the research findings was that Haitian mothers or Dominican mothers of Haitian descent could not obtain a birth certificate for their children. So this creates a situation where statelessness is being passed on through the matrilineal line, even when the fathers are Dominican citizens. The fathers cannot get a birth certificate for their children alone, they must have the mother's documents.
So, as I learned more about statelessness and the context of increasing restrictiveness and migration policies, there and also around the world, I began to wonder where else in the world women with precarious status forms are not able to register the births of their children. So that's how I came to the research topic of really focusing in on the ways in which mobility channels are obstructed a lot of times for women and especially racialized women, and secondly, how that affects their ability to gain documentation for themselves and for their children wherever they may be born.
Shawna Reibling
What effects do exclusionary birth registration practices have on children and families?
Allison Petrozziello
First, let me let me talk a little bit about what I mean by birth registration as a bordering practice. So here I'm talking about the obstacles that may be in place to getting a birth certificate for children of migrant women who maybe have a temporary permit, who may be living in a place on authorised, who may be in transit. It may also affect people who are seeking asylum and refugees living in camps. So there are different people who are not nationals who do not have a permanent residence in the place where they live, people whose mobility but also legal status is somehow circumscribed in the place where they are having children.
One kind of set of practices that I'm concerned about are restrictions that make it more difficult for for people who have these different kinds of, what I'm calling precarious status forms, that make it more difficult for them to access birth registration for their children. This can be intentional or unintentional on the part of states that there has been a move to securitize ties to civil registration and identity management as part of kind of broader moves post 911 to shore up national security and then any kind of fraud in terms of supplanting identity. So that's what I mean by birth registration as bordering practice, essentially bringing the border to baby. So that the net effect is that they are not nationals, not able to have that foundational document that establishes a relationship with their parents, and with the state where they live.
That document is so foundational, it's often called the breeder document by those who work on strengthening civil registration and vital statistics systems. Because without that document, you can't get any other documents. What effects do these exclusionary birth registration practices have? Children may not be able to be registered for school, to access health care, get a passport, move with their families, they may be stateless, and in fact, rightless Not that they don't have rights, but they're not able to access their basic rights, like health and education. It can also put the children at risk of trafficking, of family separation. If there isn't a document trail linking the children to the parents.
Shawna Reibling
Why is it important that statelessness is eliminated and that every child has a birth registration document or the breeder document?
Allison Petrozziello
The birth registration is foundational and is needed to protect children's human rights. It's also important for governance purposes, because governments need to know who lives in the territory that they're responsible for governing so that they can plan and provide adequate services and protect the children's rights. There are growing efforts to eliminate statelessness around the world. The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, has a 10 year campaign to eliminate statelessness, it's called I Belong, and they estimate that there are 10 million stateless people in the world some others have estimated 15 million. And that's still probably an underestimate, because the nature of the problem is that people are not visible people are not registered.
But I should mention that not having birth registration doesn't automatically make a person stateless. However, it can lead to a risk of statelessness if the documentation situation isn't resolved, and especially when it's passed on intergenerationally, as in the case that I mentioned of women of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. And so these are entrenched problems that require political will to resolve.
Shawna Reibling
In your research. You mentioned entrenched patterns of protecting white women's mobility and reproduction while curtailing that of non-white women. How does this happen?
Allison Petrozziello
Well, I've been learning from critical anti-racist and decolonial feminist scholars about how these patterns have played out. If we look at nation building projects, historically and today, there have been policies put in place to try to facilitate the mobility, for example of of white women to be settlers, and to encourage their reproduction to reproduce nation. And so social policies have been designed to try to encourage the establishment of families and having children. And these have been of benefit mostly to white women and a lot of different countries, including Canada. And then at the same time, we can examine the exclusionary practices affecting Indigenous women and non-white immigrant women.
Even today, we of hear cases of even forced sterilization of people who are not being encouraged to reproduce and whose maternity is not protected by social policy in the same ways. And so if we recognise these patterns, then we have to look at how these continue to be entrenched systemically in the institutions that are supposed to be protecting women's rights that are supposed to be protecting children and families. It's a perspective that's helping me ask questions about who is affected by these exclusionary birth registration practices. And over and over again, we see that they are people who are ethnic minorities in the place where they live, people who are racialized migrants, who don't have the same kinds of legal channels for migration available to them and too many countries in the global north are designing policies to try to contain their mobility in the countries where they live or in neighbouring countries so that they can not reach destination countries in North America or Europe.
We can read systems of global governance of migration from this perspective about control over social reproduction and who is to reproduce nation from this perspective and look at the practices that are happening administratively to block their children's access to citizenship and make non-white women and their children deportable.
Shawna Reibling
It can be very easy to dismiss this as not an issue that is affecting Canada and Canadians but I think we'd be wrong in that respect. Do you want to comment on that?
Allison Petrozziello
So in Canada, access to citizenship is presumed to be automatic. Most people do receive a birth certificate for their children born on the territory, because here we have "jus soli" or, the right to a nationality based on the virtue of being born here. However, I have in the global inventory of exclusionary birth registration practices, I have begun to uncover some sub national practices, which may block access to either birth registration or issuance of other documents. I heard about the withholding of statements of live birth or hospital birth notifications. And also sometimes it's withholding health cards if the parent is not a permanent resident of Ontario, for example. And so sometimes the withholding of birth notifications can happen as a means of pressuring uninsured, migrant women to pay their hospital bills. So that's a practice that I heard about that's been contested by health advocates in Quebec.
My approach to looking at where this might be happening goes beyond looking at laws, and what it says should happen on paper, and I'm concerned with administrative practices that may block access. And so to do this kind of research, you have to connect the dots between the different kinds of rights. So I explore links with other instances of rights denial. So this can be happening around access to, for example, sexual and reproductive health and rights for migrant women, around access to documentation, again, health car birth notifications, and access to actual birthright citizenship.
Although the practices aren't as widespread in Canada as other places, as far as I'm aware, we do have some public debate around, for example, what some people have called birth tourism and the stirring up of public sentiment around you know, children who are gaining access to Canadian citizenship when their mothers come to give birth in Canada that are not actually a resident here. What happens is those concerns have been used to prompt debate on whether to restrict birthright citizenship here in Canada, which is one of approximately 30 countries that continue to uphold the principle of jus soli.
However, I would point out that the data being used to inform this to me and to lay out policy options is derived from hospital financial and discharge data to ascertain the number of live births per year to non-resident women as a proxy for birth tourism. The devil is in the details you have to look at this category of non resident women, which include all forms of temporary migration international students, temporary foreign workers, in addition to tourists, so it's problematic for several reasons.
At first, it turns women's reproductive health into a potential site of migration enforcement for all non resident women, but especially in practice racialized women who are often questioned about their legal identity and status more often than white women. The misframing of the problem can affect the policy solutions that are put forth, restricting birthright citizenship would entail exorbitant costs and have far reaching negative impacts for all Canadians, increasing the risk of statelessness, in a country that has prided itself on inclusion.
Shawna Reibling
Can you comment on the global inventory of birth registration practices you're putting together?
Allison Petrozziello
So, my doctoral research tracks these exclusionary birth registrations in around the world in order to produce a global inventory and then it has more in depth case study research in the Dominican Republic. So the inventory includes birth registration practices where the process is entangled and migration enforcement or there's been some form of contestation or legal challenge brought by an NGO or non-governmental organization. I've been gathering these practices and examining both through key informant interviews with different UN and civil society, people who are working on issues of migrants rights, and birth registration, and gender equality, and also through a document review based on shadow reports to the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the CEDAW Committee, or the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
I'm looking, where there's smoke there's fire, you know, where there's been contestation where there's been reporting of, you know, these kinds of exclusionary practices, I'm documenting it with the idea of developing a typology so I can show what I mean by these exclusionary birth registration practices and what are the obstacles? What do they look like? How might we categorise them? And importantly, how might we resist them?
And so one part of this process has been a workshop that I was able to facilitate at the World Conference on Statelessness and Inclusion in The Hague. And there I had people from the UN and civil society networks and academics who came forth to share lots of different examples of where this is happening around the world. So it was a really important look at an emerging issue from a variety of perspectives and places.
Shawna Reibling
And what was that experience like?
Allison Petrozziello
It was fascinating. I mean, it was organised by the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, and they are based in the Netherlands. And they're galvanising this formation of a movement, an international movement of rights defenders, who are working on these issues, and they're bringing together artists along with academics and activists. And we're only trying to kind of rest the issue of statelessness from the grips of of international law, which is mostly how it's been studied, as if it were some sort of anomaly. And those of us who are studying it from other disciplinary perspectives, know that the story doesn't start or stop there, with a legal perspective.
And so there's a new generation of scholars who are a part of this global network of PhDs on statelessness, who are looking at it from historical perspectives, from feminist perspectives, doing critical discourse analysis, I mean, all of these different rich ways of looking at both historical and structural causes of statelessness, and also the lived experiences or consequences of statelessness in people's lives. I got to get a sense of what the global debates on this are like and to connect up with actors who are involved with the European Network on Statelessness, and with the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights. And so I'm part of these ongoing conversations about what other perspectives we might bring and how we can be more effective and eradicating statelessness.
Shawna Reibling
What did the attendees reveal to you that was unexpected?
Allison Petrozziello
There I heard over and over about the need to separate birth registration from migration enforcement. There should be firewalls between preventing information sharing between health workers and migration enforcement. I learned about these practices happening to children born to Indonesian migrant workers in the state of Sabah in Malaysia. I learned about efforts to strengthen consular services in different places so that migrants are able to access birth registration when when they're outside their country of birth. I also learned about ethnic minorities like the Roma in Europe and how entrenched discrimination against the Roma has prevented them from accessing birth, registration and proving nationality in many different countries across Europe.
I learned about practices in places like Germany where they are issuing an extract from the birth registration instead of a birth certificate for those who are unable to meet the documentation requirements, and that this extract is it's not the same as a birth certificate. So I'm starting to discover different ad hoc documentation practices that are sometimes put forth as a stopgap measure for people who are unable to jump over the bar, so to speak, and provide the documents required. However, the stopgap measure may be a dead end for many children.
And I heard that when this was, when these documents were issued to children of Serbians, for example, when they would go back to Serbia and tried to get a birth certificate the Serbian authorities would not recognise that extract as a foundational document. And so people continue to be stateless, regardless of these ad hoc solutions put forth.
Shawna Reibling
One target within the UN sustainable development goals is to provide legal identity for all by 2030, including birth registration. What kinds of efforts are underway to achieve this?
Allison Petrozziello
Well I've mentioned several already that are aligned with the Sustainable Development target 16.9, on legal identity for all the UNHCR and UNICEF, the UN Children's Fund are involved with promoting universal birth registration. And so it's interesting to look at how the the target is formulated, because it says legal identity for all including birth registration. So it would seem to suggest that birth registration is part of legal identity, but not the whole, you know, it's not enough, it's not all of it. And so there's been a debate, even within the UN.
The UN now has a legal identity agenda that is defining what we mean by legal identity. But if you look at, and I've been tracking a bit of the the funding available for these efforts, and if you look at who's actually working on it, we see that the World Bank is a major funder of digital ID. And so there are a lot of efforts being put forth to try to document people and provide a digital identity for them, which may or may not be grounded in a civil registration system. And so by this, I'm talking about biometric IDs, I'm talking about ways to authenticate identity for people so that they can basically be consumers and participate and open a bank account and prove who they are without necessarily having a legal affiliation to a state. So there's one set of efforts that are working on that digital ID.
And the other set of efforts is working on strengthening civil registration and vital statistics systems. And so here we have, in Canada, we have some leadership on the part of the International Development Research Centre and, with funding from Global Affairs Canada, they've set up a Centre of Excellence for CRVS systems, which is kind of an unwieldy acronym, but it's, again, civil registration and vital statistics. And so it's a knowledge hub based in Ottawa and they're providing finance some financing and technical assistance for different governments around the world who are working to really modernise their civil registration systems and get everybody in the picture. There's much less funding available for those efforts, which are often seen, as you know, a fundamental responsibility of states to provide identity documents for people who are born and live in their country.
There's a lot more funding available for working on on digital ID and I think there's a danger and focusing on digital ID without civil registration, because you're untethering or unmooring identity from the purview of states if you are figuring out other ways to authenticate that. So I think there's some, there's a lot of tension, and a lot of debate around where our efforts should lie and there's a danger also in a stepping back from a human rights based approach and just kind of turning people into their digital identity and their function as consumers rather than as people with a human right to an identity and nationality. There are a lot of corporations, big tech is involved in in providing the technological solutions. And they end up kind of locking states in, and I'm talking about a lot of different developing states.
There's a whole regional initiative, I think it's called ID for Africa, and a lot of private sector service providers who are offering contracts to governments to set up these systems and then kind of locking in the government to that contract because any kind of update any kind of management of that system continues to be reliant on that a service provider, on that corporation. So there, there are a lot of lots of questions that we can ask from a global governance perspective about power. And about obligations between, you know, does does a corporation have the same kind of obligations to the beneficiaries of its systems as a state does to its citizens? I think the obvious answer to that is no. We're at a moment in history where the UN system and their authority has been undermined where a lot of states are in a bind and we have massive global corporations that are finding new markets and ways to lock in consumers and turn vulnerable people into consumers before citizens. So I think, that's not my direct area of research but, I'm aware of the political economic ramifications of all of this.
Shawna Reibling
What challenges have you encountered in your research so far?
Allison Petrozziello
Well, one challenge is how to pivot from local research grounded in a particular case, the case of the most familiar with in the Dominican Republic, to look at global policy trends in migration governance, and to link them up with the other policy realms that I'm interested in population governance, in social policy governing reproduction. So kind of toggling between the local and the global. Fortunately, feminist theory has been useful in specifically feminist political economy and political geography, feminist geopolitics, it's been really helpful to move beyond this local/global binary.
So now I'm working with the concept of the global intimate to interrogate the ways in which international politics play out in the most intimate spheres of our lives, and in particular in the lives of pregnant racialized women on the move. There's no such thing as separating out the local and the global when a woman gives birth in a place that's inconvenient in the eyes of certain states, and is unable to obtain a document proving the existence of that new human being because of the political forces at play in her life and her child's life.
Shawna Reibling
What advice do you have for those who want to help eliminate statelessness?
Allison Petrozziello
Those who are interested in eliminating statelessness would do well to familiarise themselves with a set of issues and we have a new journal called The Statelessness and Citizenship Review that is bringing together the work of interdisciplinary scholars on statelessness issues. I would also encourage you to take a look at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, on the UNHCR global campaign called I belong, and also the global campaign for equal nationality rights, which works to eliminate gender discrimination and nationality laws. In many countries and, I think over 25 countries, they still have nationality laws which do not allow women to pass on their nationality on an equal basis with men and these are based on patriarchal notions of you know, men being the head of household and the one to confer nationality on the children, laws that have been on the books since colonial times.
I would also make the case, for those who are already working on statelessness issues, for taking an intersectional feminist approach. There are several of us feminist researchers and practitioners who have been asking where's the feminism in work on statelessness? Why is statelessness so rarely discussed as both a gendered and racialized phenomenon? Where is the recognition that people are not just stateless, but have multiple identities that interact with these intersecting forms of oppression? And what's what's missing? What are we failing to understand about both the causes and consequences of statelessness because of this blind spot? So we're starting to think about this.
I have a book chapter that's coming out in an upcoming volume called Statelessness and Governance arguing for taking an intersectional feminist approach to the study of statelessness. I would argue for that, I would argue for those working on statelessness to really bring migration governance into view and some of the the ways in which ad hoc and temporary status forms really limit people's access to rights, including birth registration for their children, because there are ostensibly new ways in which people are being made stateless. It's an old problem, but there are new technologies and acted upon identity.
And so unfortunately, some of these global trends of making migration and citizenship laws more restrictive and enacting practices that block access may end up producing pockets of stateless people in places that we aren't even looking yet. That's my larger, what I hope to be, my larger contribution to debates on statelessness at the present time.
Shawna Reibling
Voting registration and citizenship are fundamental to achieving Western democratic goals, how can strengthening civil registration systems contribute to more democratic societies?
Allison Petrozziello
So well, birth registration is a fundamental human right. Its impact goes beyond the individual or the family and has vital importance for the state and a profound effect on governance at both the national level and the international level. And I've already talked about its implications in terms of planning and improving services. But in terms of democracy, it also is of fundamental importance in fostering democratic processes. I mean, a birth registration is a vital link in establishing nationality, it confers on the individual the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
So you have to have credible and transparent civil register in order to create voting systems. You know, electoral roles are often compiled from the Civil Registry. Also registration, birth, registration, and conferral of nationality can give you access to the right to vote, and also be able to stand for office and take an active role in your political life. But there are a lot of political and legal challenges. Those who are interested in this, I would encourage to look at this and look to the centre of excellence for CRVS systems.
Shawna Reibling
What are the next steps in your research?
Allison Petrozziello
Well, I've had some delays because of COVID-19. So I'm moving ahead with field research in the Dominican Republic but I'm doing so remotely and relying on collaboration with the Caribbean Migrants Observatory. So there I will be working with a local research assistant to understand the experiences of Haitian women and Dominican women of Haitian descent, as they are navigating different programs for regularization for migrants and naturalization for their descendants, and whether any of the initiatives taken in the Dominican Republic have had some results in terms of guaranteeing the right to a nationality and to birth registration for their descendants. So, so that's this study.
And then I'm continuing to work on the global inventory, and the interviews with the key stakeholders. So I hope to be writing a dissertation within the next year bringing together all of this into what will eventually be a book on birth registration is bordering practice and looking at doing a feminist analysis of everyday migration, governance and the intergenerational transmission of statelessness.
Shawna Reibling
Do you have any plans for public engagement on these issues?
Allison Petrozziello
I mean, I've mentioned several of the different actors that I've been working with engaging with the global campaign for equal nationality rights to look beyond what is the gender discrimination, nationality laws to also look at implementation and administrative practices that block women from being able to register the birth of their children on an equal basis with men, arguing that they have the same effect which is child statelessness.
So I'm engaging with them, engaging with the IDRC Centre of Excellence on CRVS systems to again bring a gender and migration perspective to that work. They had an important conference in Ottawa that was making the case for strengthening civil registration as a measure towards gender equality. I think that I continue to learn from those who are working from decolonial perspectives, because I think there's a lot of work to be done to examine the ways in which documentation laws and systems have been derived to categorise and govern people who are not part of the governing elite.
And so we're talking about Indigenous people, we're talking about racial and ethnic minorities and descendants of immigrant populations, who may have a well grounded fear of approaching state institutions and the ways in which the documents they are issued may strip identity, may actually be used to violate their rights instead of uphold them. And I think they're they're examples in many places that point in promising directions. South Africa is one that has almost achieved universal birth registration, despite the legacy of apartheid and previous distrust in documentation systems run by the state. And so that's a major hurdle to overcome, you know, historical legacy of racism and colonialism but, you still have migrants and refugees who may not be able to access birth registration there.
I think that we need to kind of recognise important efforts in different places and also continue to build upon them. I'm learning from these many cases around the world and working to bring the research results to bear on ongoing policy advocacy, with you know, related to these different global campaigns.
Shawna Reibling
Is there anything that I have not asked about your research or your experience at Laurier that you want to say?
Allison Petrozziello
I think that that's it.
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Shawna Reibling
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