- Associate Professor, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham
Melanie is a social scientist and Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham working on migration politics and immigration enforcement in the UK. She has written on asylum appeals, family life rights, immigration detention, deportation, the hostile environment, time, masculinity, and the emotions of the immigration system. This includes investigating the impact of insecure immigration status and deportation on mixed-citizenship families in the UK (at the University of Bristol) (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/gees/research/projects/deportation-and-the-family/index.aspx). She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford, in association with COMPAS and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
Experience
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2018–presentAssociate professor, University of Birmingham
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2014–2017Senior research associate, University of Bristol
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2013–2013Research associate, University of Exeter
Education
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2014University of Oxford, DPhil
Publications
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2023Emotional governance and immigration controls, Identities
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2021The UK’s hostile environment: Deputising immigration control, Critical Social Policy
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2019‘My passport is just my way out of here’. Mixed-immigration status families, immigration enforcement and the citizenship implications, Identities
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2017Seeking asylum and the politics of family, Families, Relationships and Societies
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2017Foreign, Criminal: a doubly damned modern British folk-devil, Citizenship Studies
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2015‘Here, man is nothing!’ Gender and Policy in an Asylum Context, Men and Masculinities
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2014Out of Time: the Temporal Uncertainties of Refused Asylum Seekers and Immigration Detainees, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
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2013Griffiths, M. Living with Uncertainty: Indefinite Immigration Detention, Journal of Legal Anthropology
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2012Anonymous Aliens: Questions of Identification in the Detention and Deportation of Failed Asylum Seekers, Population, Space and Place
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2012‘Vile liars and truth distorters’: Truth, trust and the asylum system, Anthropology Today
Grants and Contracts
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2025British Academy mid career Fellowship
- Role:
- PI
- Funding Source:
- British Academy
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2014ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship
- Role:
- PI
- Funding Source:
- Economic and Social Research Council
Honours
Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (2018+)
Contact Melanie for
- General
- Media request
- Speaking request
- Consulting / Advising
- Research collaboration
- Research supervision