Jennifer Kandjii, PhD is the Director, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (Student Services) at Simon Fraser University. Her research employs an interdisciplinary, human rights-based approach to forced migration, displacement, and social exclusion, with particular attention to the lived experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons.

Her doctoral work examined xenophobic citizenship and the everyday assembling of refugee exclusion in South Africa, drawing on legal empowerment and capability-based frameworks to understand how exclusion is produced and contested in protracted displacement settings. Her broader research agenda extends this lens to food insecurity among refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa, the housing, land, and property rights of internally displaced persons in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Canada’s human rights and peacebuilding responses to mass atrocity, with a consistent focus on the experiences of vulnerable and marginalized populations. Her current research interests extend this human rights lens into Indigenous-focused, community-based participatory research and institutional equity and anti-racism in higher education.

Jennifer has carried out this research in partnership with academic, community, and government stakeholders across multiple projects, including a multi-country research initiative on localized knowledge ecosystems at Carleton University and Indigenous focused on the experiences of Indigenous Social Workers at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Faculty of Social Work. Prior to her doctoral studies, she spent over seven years in field-based research and programming with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), leading protection and gender-based violence prevention work with refugee populations.

Jennifer currently applies this research background to institutional practice as Director, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (Student Services) at Simon Fraser University, where she leads institution-wide EDI and anti-racism initiatives across three campuses, including the establishment of SFU’s first Black Student Centre, Menstrual Equity, Demographic and Diversity Data, and the university’s institutional response to the Scarborough Charter on anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion.