Current Projects

Crimes of Solidarity

As part of my Leverhulme Prize Fellowship 2021-24, I am developing a programme of work (including a bid for project funding) which will explore the international spread of ‘crimes of solidarity’. That is, the criminalisation of acts such as offering food, shelter, or sea rescue to irregular migrants. I will be mapping the spread of these laws over time and developing a programme of work to explore and understand their meaning and impacts.

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Postcolonial Historical Sociology

Understanding the implications, legacies, traces, or continuities of European colonialism for contemporary social life has become a growing area of interest in migration studies in recent years. Much of the methodological discussion that this ‘postcolonial turn’ has precipitated in migration studies has been focussed on the ethics of contemporary migration research methods, and on North-South power relations in the research process. While such discussions are deeply important, very little has been said about other methodological questions. This project focuses specifically on the question of doing historically informed research. How do we methodologically deal with vast temporal and spatial phenomena? How do we trace ideas over time? How do we map continuity and change? What is a legacy? Growing interest in postcolonial and decolonial migration research necessitates the development and uncovering of concepts and methodological tools for undertaking what might be termed postcolonial historical sociology.

Channel Crossings

With Arshad Isakjee (University of Liverpool), Joe Turner (University of York) and Thom Davies (University of Nottingham), I am involved in a programme of work on UK government responses to irregular (small boat) Channel crossings. As a group we are interested in thinking about Channel crossings and responses to them in the context of colonial histories. Our work is funded by an ESRC research grant (£585,000) 2022-2025.

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Past Projects

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Postcoloniality and Forced Migration

Postcoloniality and Forced Migration is an edited collection of essays covering many different countries, disciplinary perspectives and scales of analysis. It showcases the strength and diversity of understanding that can emerge from taking seriously the role of colonialism in shaping the world that we live in today.

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past projects

Asylum After Empire

Asylum After Empire was my doctoral project (supervised by Gurminder K Bhambra). Published as a monograph in 2017, the project explores how hostility to people seeking asylum in contemporary Britain can be understood in the context of colonial histories, particularly ideas of differential humanity. I passed my PhD without corrections and Asylum After Empire (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018) was awarded the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the best first monograph by the BSA in 2018.

Asylum. Welfare. Work

Asylum. Welfare Work was a project funded via the ESRC Future Research Leaders sheme. It ran 2015-2019 and explored three aspects of asylum, welfare, and work in the UK. First, how politicians and policymakers imagine asylum seeking, and how this in turn shapes policy, irrespective of research evidence. Second, the impacts of the policy on third sector organisations, including costing the financial burden of supporting people who should be supported by the state. Third, the impacts of the policies on people awaiting a decision on their asylum applications. There were a number of publications and outputs from the project, including the monograph ‘Impoverishment and Asylum: Social Policy as Slow Violence’ (Routledge, 2019).