I am Associate Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I hold a DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Previously, I was a Post-doctoral Fellow at The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and a Research Student at Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society.
My research focuses on forced migration, refugees, and humanitarianism. In my work, I look particularly at the moves of western governments towards developing outsourced asylum regimes. I conceptualize these patterns as a contemporary form of resource extraction, much like other forms of mining, but that involves racialized migrants as commodities. I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the impacts of outsourcing asylum on migrants, local residents, government agencies, and contracted workforces in the Republic of Nauru, Australia, Geneva, and Fiji to research projects in Guatemala, Jordan, and Lebanon.
I was awarded the 2024 Rising Research Excellence Award from UNCW for faculty who are recognized as emerging leaders in their fields.
My book, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru, is recently published with Cornell University Press. Reviews are available in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Border Criminologies, Crime, Media, Culture, Current Anthropology, International Migration, Law & Society Review, and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
I have written numerous articles and book chapters on these policy arrangement tendencies, but am also a proponent of public scholarship. I wrote this article on the proposed UK-Rwanda outsourced asylum deal for The Conversation and this article for Washington D.C.’s Migration Policy Institute on the impacts of outsourcing asylum on local communities. I wrote this piece on Nauru’s recent de-recognition of Taiwan for Georgetown University’s Oceanic Currents. I also regularly give media interviews on these concerns.
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