About

I'm a freelance journalist, editor and researcher based in Vancouver. My writing and investigations on sustainability, global development, human rights and immigration have been published by a range of media outlets, including the New York Times, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, the National Post, the Financial Post and Reuters. I’m also Deputy Editor of Asparagus, a magazine that tells the small and large stories of how we can live sustainably.

Previously, I covered sustainability for The Discourse, where I launched a newsletter on sustainable development in Canada, investigated Canada's policies on plastic pollution and worked on a toolkit to help improve the media's coverage of refugees.

Before that, I was the 2016 Michelle Lang Fellow at Postmedia News, where I spent a year covering daily news for the Calgary Herald and the National Post with a focus on immigration and refugees.  As a fellow, I wrote a six-part investigation on Canadian immigration policy, revealing how it results in billions of dollars of losses to the economy and and pushes thousands of workers into the underground economy. The project was published in newspapers across Canada. 

My journalistic projects are influenced by my background in social science research. I have carried out quantitative and qualitative research on citizenship rights and quality of life in Indian cities as a William J. Clinton Fellow at the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy in India and as a graduate student at the University of Oxford.   

I am available for freelance assignments, adventures and collaborations. Please get in touch at alia.dharssi@gmail.com.