Karun Karki

Dr. Karki’s scholarly inquiries are grounded in social justice, equity, community-engaged research, and critical social work scholarship. His research examines how historically marginalized and minoritized communities – including immigrants, migrants, refugees, caste-oppressed communities, and 2S/LGBTQIA+ people – experience, navigate, and resist systems of exclusion while fostering belonging, collective agency, well-being, and social change. Since 2020, he has led or co-led more than 24 research projects as a Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator, securing over $3.53 million in research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), provincial funding agencies, community partnerships, and internal university grants. His major areas of research and scholarship include: - Critical social work praxis and transformative justice, including anti-racist, anti-colonial, intersectional, and anti-oppressive approaches. - Critical theories of power, governance, borders, dispossession, and structural violence, including postcolonial, posthumanist, biopolitical, necropolitical, and critical border studies. - Migration, displacement, refugee resettlement, diaspora, belonging, identity, and settlement in Canadian and transnational contexts. - Caste-based discrimination, caste-oppressed communities, and anti-caste justice in diasporic and transnational settings. - Gender, sexuality, 2S/LGBTQIA+ communities, state-sanctioned exclusion, and homonationalism. - Precarious work, platform-mediated gig labour, deskilling, racialized labour-market exclusion, and ethno-racial and gender segregation. - Social determinants of health, collective well-being, and structural inequities among immigrant, refugee, and diasporic communities. Dr. Karki welcomes the opportunity to mentor students interested in any of the above research areas. Areas of Scholarship: Critical social work theory and praxis; migration, displacement, refugee resettlement, and transnational belonging; racialized and South Asian diasporas; caste-based discrimination and anti-caste justice; 2S/LGBTQIA+ communities, gender, sexuality, and homonationalism; biopolitics, necropolitics, sovereign power, borders, and state governance; social determinants of health and structural health inequities; HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, and gender-based violence; precarious employment, platform-mediated gig labour, deskilling, and labour-market exclusion. Area of Practice: Community capacity building and mobilization; equity-oriented research, policy, and program planning; settlement and integration practice; casework with immigrants, refugees, and racialized communities; trauma-informed and culturally responsive practice; psychosocial and emotional well-being; advocacy, social justice practice, and community-based partnerships.

Jnawali, H. H., & Karki, K. K. (accepted). Decolonization of academic practices in Canadian universities: Non-Indigenous students as the allies. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Karki, K. K. (2026). Deskilling and labour market barriers among skilled racialized immigrants in British Columbia: A mixed-methods study. Comparative Migration Studies, 14(1), 1-25. Karki, K. K., Mensah, A., Sethi, B., & Dhungel, R. (2026). Gendered constraints and structural barriers: Deskilling among skilled racial immigrants in the Canadian labour market. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 56 (3), 73-103. Karki, K. K. (2026). Merit, migration, and marginalization: Exploring the skilled migration paradox through the lived experiences of racialized immigrants in Canada. The Journal of Race