Ciao, I’m Nancy Perin
Somewhere between the country you left and the one you built, between the person you were supposed to become and the one who is still figuring it out, there is a version of you that has been waiting. Very patiently. For permission to speak. That is not a small thing to carry. And it is not a small thing to finally set down.
I’m Nancy Perin — sociologist, cultural activist, storyteller, and executive director of the Gallery of Human Migration in Toronto. I write about identity, migration, moral courage, and what it actually costs to be human in a world that would rather you stay quiet and keep things smooth. Sociology is how I look. Story is how I speak. And I am not here to produce content. I am here because something real is at stake, and you already know it.
You didn’t land here by accident.
Something brought you — a word, a headline, a feeling you couldn’t name but recognised the moment you saw it.
Maybe you arrived from somewhere else and learned, slowly, to make yourself smaller in order to belong. You became fluent in a version of yourself that other people found easier. And now, after all this time, you are beginning to wonder what you buried to do that.
Maybe you are on the other side of something large. A loss. A leaving. A version of yourself that no longer fits. You need to know that what you are building now is not defeat. It is something that has no name yet, but it is yours.
Maybe you have been reading between the lines for years. You know the official story is incomplete. You are not looking for comfort. You are looking for someone who will not look away, who will name what is happening without flinching and without performing outrage.
Maybe you travel to understand, not to escape. You want to come back changed, not just well-photographed.
Or maybe you hold the story. A grandmother’s crossing. A father’s silence. A language that is losing its last fluent speakers in your family. You are running out of time to write it down and you need someone to tell you: it is worth the telling. You are exactly the right person to tell it.
Whoever brought you here: you are seen. For everything you carry. For the parts you have not shown anyone yet.
You are not too late. You are exactly on time.
I grew up in the space between cultures. Not lost in it—shaped by it. That is where sociology found me: in the gap between the story a society tells about itself and the story you actually live. I have spent years reading those gaps, writing about them, and building communities to hold them.
The Gallery of Human Migration is the most concrete version of that work. This blog is where I think out loud. The Standing for Humanity series is where I refuse to look away from what is happening in the world and name it, with evidence, in plain language.
I am not a neutral observer. I do not believe neutrality is possible when human beings are suffering. I believe identity is a living process, not a fixed address. I believe migration is not a problem to be solved. And I believe, without apology, that a shared meal and an honest conversation can still change a room — and that changing a room is how you begin to change everything else.
Be inspired by the stories of migration!
The Gallery of Human Migration was founded in Toronto in 2003 on a belief I share completely: migration is not a problem to be solved. It is a fundamental human right and one of the most powerful forces shaping who we are.
I serve as the Gallery’s executive director. This blog is my own—but it leans toward the Gallery’s work. If you carry a migration story—your own, your family’s, or your community’s—the Gallery is where it lives.
Because when a story goes untold, a light goes dark.
People who chose to live and speak from the place most of us are still finding our way back to
What this space was built for
The most important conversations happening right now are not taking place in parliaments or boardrooms.
They are happening between a grandmother and her granddaughter trying to remember a language. Between two strangers who discover they left the same country for entirely different reasons. Between a person looking at a map and feeling the pull of somewhere they have never been but somehow already know.
This blog was built for those conversations. Not to explore cultures as a spectator sport. To ask what it costs to leave one, what it takes to build belonging in another, and what becomes possible when people from different worlds decide to truly see each other.
This is not content. This is connection. And you are not a visitor here — you are part of it.
it.
Slow travel. Deep roots. The world encountered as a question rather than a backdrop
A road through the Gaspé Peninsula in the first autumn of post-pandemic freedom. A cemetery above the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And a name on a headstone that turned a road trip into a pilgrimage.
My life has been defined by movement—between countries, cultures, and the people I love most. Today, on Giving Tuesday, I’m asking you to join me in supporting the Gallery of Human Migration. Every story it holds is proof that ordinary lives, when shared with courage, become something the world cannot afford to lose.
Where I put my name on what I see. Not commentary. Not outrage. Witness—with evidence and with conscience.
When Mark Carney announced the Canada Strong Fund on April 27, 2026, he said it plainly: this is not for rich people. It is for all Canadians. Nancy Perin, sociologist and Executive Director of the Gallery of Human Migration, has spent decades watching economies restructure and knows what the vocabulary of transformation—asset recycling, private equity, and sovereign wealth—tends to leave behind. In this Standing for Humanity piece, she examines what the fund’s structure actually promises, who bears the risk, and why loving your country means demanding better answers than this.
A surveillance camera on a wall in the occupied West Bank, flagging a hoodie, a movement pattern—Canadian-funded, Israeli-built, later deployed on Greek refugees, now aimed inward through Bill C-22. On Nancy Perin, a forensic tracing of Canadian foreign policy from Stephen Harper’s Christian Zionist alignment and his venture capital in Israeli military surveillance tech, through Mark Carney’s “principled and pragmatic” doctrine and its Defence, Security and Resilience Bank. The story Canada keeps telling itself about its values—and the policy record that contradicts it sentence by sentence.
Immerse yourself in the Italian experience for a private retreat, a relaxing escape, or an inspiring intellectual refuge
Home is not just where you sleep. It is where you are allowed to be all of yourself: unhurried, unperformed, and genuinely at rest. The Baule is a curated guest room in our 100-year-old Toronto home, woven with Italian family heritage, a blooming wisteria garden, and a breakfast that feels like arriving in Nonna’s kitchen.
When you stay here, you’re not just booking a room. You’re stepping into a chapter of that journey. Take a little tour of ‘The Baule!’
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