My research investigates the political economy of migration, and in particular the management of people’s mobility. I analyze the material overlaps that take shape between humans, animals, and things in practices of migration governance, and especially outsourced asylum regimes. With a focus on the commodification of human mobility that spans different geographies, I conduct historical and ethnographic research on the logics of racialization, dehumanization, and extraction that are symptomatic of - and contested in - border landscapes.

My book, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru, is recently published with Cornell University Press. It looks at the consequential damages of phosphate and asylum processing in Nauru, with a focus on the relations between high-risk mineral and migrant extractive industries.

I am currently working on a new book project that brings together my fieldwork across outsourced asylum sites together with the analytic of resource frontiering.

Please contact me if you cannot access a publication.

Books

2023.   Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

2023. Necropolitics as Accumulation: Enforcement and Enclosure in Brisbane During COVID-19. Political Geography 102.

2022. Managing, Now Becoming, Refugees: Climate Change and Extractivism in the Republic of Nauru. American Anthropologist 124 (3): 560-574.

2021. Colonial Afterlives of Infrastructure: From Phosphate to Refugee Processing in the Republic of Nauru. Mobilities 16 (5): 688-706.

2021. The Value of Refugees: UNHCR and the Growth of the Global Refugee Industry. Journal of Refugee Studies 34 (3): 2676-2698.

2020. Violence and Extraction of a Human Commodity: From Phosphate to Refugees in the Republic of Nauru. The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (4): 1122-1133. Awarded the Most Provocative and Stimulating Paper Award by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 2019.

2020. Refugee Extractivism: Law and Mining a Human Commodity in the Republic of Nauru. Saint Louis University Law Journal Special Issue 64 (1).

Book Chapters

2024. Making Markets: The Historical Development of the Refugee Regime. In Research Handbook on Asylum and Refugee Policy. J. Freedman and G. Santana de Andrade, eds. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.

2024. On People and Places That Matter: Racialised Assemblages in Hyperextractive Outsourced Asylum Regimes. In Deter, Detain, Dehumanise: The Politics of Seeking Asylum. L. Briskman and R. Sharples, eds. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

2023. (Im)mobility Economies: Extractivism of the Refugee as a Human Commodity. The Lives and Afterlives of Extraction. Identities, Communities, and the Politics of Place. Calvão, Filipe, Matthew Archer and Asanda Benya, eds. Geneva, Boston: Graduate Institute Publications, Brill-Nijhoff.

2021. Strange Bedfellows?: NGOs and Offshore Detention. In Forced Displacement and NGOs in Asia Pacific. Inanc G. and Lewis T., eds. London: Routledge.

2020. Making a Market in Refugees in the Republic of Nauru. In Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry. Pine A. and McGuirk S., eds. Oakland: PM Press.

Op-eds/Public Scholarship

2024. ‘China-Taiwan Dollar Diplomacy Signals Worrying Futures Ahead for Nauru.’ Oceanic Currents. Georgetown University’s Center for Australian, New Zealand & Pacific Studies Blog, 29 January.

2023. As Nauru Shows, Asylum Outsourcing Has Unexpected Impacts on Host Communities. Migration Information Source, 29 August.

2023. The Global Trend of Outsourcing Asylum. Cornell University Press Authors’ Blogs, 11 April.

2023. ‘A toxic policy with little returns’ – lessons for the UK-Rwanda deal from Australia and the US. The Conversation, 24 March.

2018. Refugee Economies: Violence and Extraction of a Human Commodity. Society & Space: Special Issue ‘Destitution Economies.’

2017. Outsourcing the Refugee ‘Crisis.’ Social Justice Journal Online. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Resource frontiers in asylum

I have conducted collaborative student research projects into migration governance regimes in Guatemala and Jordan.

Guatemala: I worked with students at UNCW to examine the merging of development and migration governance regimes in Guatemala. With the support of a Student Undergraduate Research and Creativity Award and First Year Research Engagement initiatives, students conducted desk and field research into US funding of border enforcement in the Petén and western Sololá regions. I am separately looking at the development of a national asylum system in the country.

Jordan: The creation of special economic zones (SEZs) – in which refugees are provided with the right to work, while trade partners such as the European Union give trading concessions on manufactured products – has been globally championed as an innovative alternative to refugee camps, as well as to protracted refugee situations. This project uses ethnographic field methods and global production theory, to examine if SEZs represent progress towards realizing mobility rights for displaced persons, or another move towards capturing the market and labor power ideals. I organized and lead graduate field intensive courses in Jordan during the spring and summer breaks in 2018/19, in which I led groups of students to examine the work of nongovernmental organizations focused on Syrian resettlement. Students designed a research project as a group and learned to conduct meaningful ethnographic research in sensitive contexts while obtaining an overview of the central debates in refugees and humanitarian politics. Both field courses were fully funded by the International Rescue Committee. I presented the research at an alternative solutions workshop on refugee protection in Toronto, devised for the Fall 2018 Global Compact on Refugees, and again though Columbia University’s Global Center in Amman in 2019.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles and Public Scholarship

2024. Reborn in Guate”: Making Resource Frontiers in Asylum in Guatemala’s Northern Petén. Migration Politics 3 (1): 1-29.

2022. ¿Por qué Quédate?: Frontiering through Development in Guatemala. Anuac 11 (2): 1-29.

2022. Resource frontiers in Guatemalan conservation. MoLab Inventory of Mobilities and Socioeconomic Changes. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

2020. Extractive Landscapes: The Case of the Jordan Refugee Compact. Refuge 37 (2): 87-96.

2019. The Politics of Return from Jordan to Syria. Forced Migration Review Special Issue, October 62: 31-34.

See also ‘Mobile livelihoods in the humanitarian sector.’ A MoLab Conversation with Julia Morris and Biao Xiang.

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multispecies mobilities

I am currently pursuing a newer project that involves connecting environmental and mobilities justice. I am working in dialogue with conservation practitioners, artists, and publics to create more equitable forms of understanding dwelling and moving. Some of my project work, such as my involvement with the Berlin-based Club Real’s Organisms Democracy project, extends my interest in the role of the creative arts in rethinking human mobility. This project brings together local communities in wild garden spaces under the understanding that all humans, creatures, and plants that live there have the same political rights of existence. Extending these ideas, I am experimenting with different ideas of how mobility justice paradigms can relate to forms of artistic engagement. What design projects can envisage radical ways of being, moving and making shared worlds together? How can the movements of plants, animals, and peoples can bring new perspectives to rethinking human mobility and conviviality? I have held residencies in Olot, Catalonia and Berlin, Germany and am exploring research projects in Christmas Island and Guatemala to carry out these theoretical concepts in practice.

See ‘Multispecies mobilities and the arts.’ A MoLab Conversation with Julia Morris and Biao Xiang.

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reforming immigration detention: humanitarian expertise, conflicted knowledge and the neoliberal governance of migration

In the drive to improve the expanding practice of immigration detention, state and non-state actors have begun to elicit and implement immigration detention reforms worldwide, developing an elaborate multilateral framework around improvement. This project focused on these policies and practices of migration governance, looking at the work of the human rights and development experts and agencies that respond to increased practices of state migration securitization. 

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

2020. Coping and Confinement on the Border: The Affective Politics of Music Workshops in British Immigration Detention. Ethnomusicology Forum 29 (1): 107-125.

2017. Power, Capital and Immigration Detention Rights: Making Networked Markets in Global Detention Governance at UNHCR. Global Networks 17: 400–422. 

Book Chapters

2016. In the Market of Morality: International Human Rights Standards and the Immigration Detention Improvement Complex. In Intimate Economies: Critical Perspectives on Immigration Detention. Hiemstra, N. and Conlon, D., eds. London: Routledge.