Associate Professor of Law & Director of Graduate Law Programs, UQAM (Faculté de science politique et de droit); Member, Barreau du Québec
Dr. Ndeye Dieynaba Ndiaye is a Québécoise/Canadian woman of Senegalese origin who considers herself a citizen of the world. A Black African woman, she is an associate professor of law at UQAM’s FSPD, specializing in human rights and freedoms and in migration and refugee law, built on more than a decade of academic training across universities in Senegal, Italy, France, and Quebec, conducted in French, Italian, and English. In 2025, she was called to the Barreau du Québec and appointed Director of Graduate Law Programs at UQAM — milestones that, alongside her tenured professorship in migration law, place her at the center of shaping Canada’s future legal scholars and practitioners. As the first Black immigrant woman to become an associate professor of law across all of Quebec’s law faculties, she has written publicly on the systemic racism Black women continue to face within Canadian universities, insisting that individual success cannot substitute for structural change.
Her influence extends into national governance and policy: in 2022, the federal Minister of National Defence appointed her Governor-in-Council at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean for a four-year mandate, and she has served on an FRQNT postdoctoral fellowship evaluation committee shaping the next generation of Quebec researchers. In 2019, she founded OMIRAS, an observatory on international migration, refugees, statelessness, and asylum, built on the principle that countries most affected by migration — and scholars from them — should produce knowledge about it themselves. She previously coordinated Université Laval’s interdisciplinary research centre on Africa and the Middle East and serves on the blog committee of the Institut d’études internationales de Montréal, translating complex migration and legal questions for general audiences. Her comparative research spans the migration, refugee, and asylum frameworks of Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, France, Italy, and Canada, bringing deliberately decolonized perspectives to a field that has too often excluded the voices and legal traditions she centers.
Her community impact has been formally recognized: SOIIT honored her contribution to Quebec’s Black immigrant populations in 2022, and CBC named her a Black Changemaker in 2021. Earlier in her career, she spent roughly six years as a tutor in Université Laval’s graduate student-support centre, was co-recipient of the Prix de la Relève en Or for her work with the university’s parent-students’ association, and was recognized by Université Laval as an exemplary woman on International Women’s Day in 2019. She is a member of the Barreau du Québec and holds that respect for differences is a fundamental principle, guided by an Ubuntu ethic: that every person — without distinction of race, colour, sex, religion, sexual orientation, belief, ability, age, or immigration status — deserves to live in a just and equitable world. As she puts it: “Ubuntu: All for One, One for All.”
