Public information campaigns in the US and Australian context

This collaborative project (with Dr. Jill Williams, University of Arizona) is funded by the National Science Foundation (2019-2023), and my project team and I are examining the development, implementation, and geography of public information campaigns (PICs) as a strategy of border enforcement by the US and Australian governments. Both countries have developed and circulated PICs since the 1990s in an attempt to affect migrant decision-making and reduce unauthorized migration flows. This project uses mixed qualitative methods and feminist visualization strategies to understand the development, implementation, and impact of PICs as a technology of border enforcement and how the mobilization of PICs rework the geographies of border enforcement and state sovereignty globally. We are particularly interested in feminist visualization as a strategy for mapping the new ways PICs infiltrate the everyday lives of potential migrants and their families and communities - our website here documents some of our work thinking about the possibilities of feminist visualization. 

Ad hoc and arbitrary governance of forced migrants in Thailand

Since 2015, I’ve explored the governance of refugees in non-signatory Thailand, a major regional transit hub that has become a destination for refugees from the Middle East and East Africa. As I’ve argued for papers in Mobilities (2020) and Social & Cultural Geography (in press), Thailand’s lack of legal protections for asylum seekers have not prevented them from seeking protection in Thailand, but increasingly spectacular enforcement and tightening restrictions on living and working opportunities result in increasingly precarious living conditions for refugees in Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Ad hoc and arbitrary governance of migrants is standard, and as I argue in a chapter for an edited volume about Southeast Asian refugee protection (forthcoming), often the Thai government prioritizes the affective impressions of humanitarian protection and administrative competence over the genuine protection of refugees in Thai territory. Instead, securitization of migration through increasing use of biometric registrations and other forms of surveillance have accompanied restrictive enforcement strategies, such as targeted raids, arrests, and low-level harassment of forced migrants in Thailand’s urban spaces. Ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand demonstrates how a state that was historical hub for human mobility can simultaneously also offer few national or regional protections for forced migrants. 

Expanding scope of border enforcement in Australia

Since 2009, I’ve researched the effects of Australia’s expanding border enforcement regime, which operates both on-shore and extraterritorially to deter and interdict asylum seekers, particularly those arriving by boat. Immigration detention has become a cornerstone of Australia’s approach to forced migration, as I detail in my (2017) chapter about the city of Darwin’s move to become Australia’s “Capital of Detention,” and its deterrence efforts have spread throughout the Asia-Pacific region, from the push-backs of asylum seekers vessels in the Indian Ocean (chapter in Territory Beyond Terra, 2018) to the use of regional public information campaigns to bombard potential asylum seekers with negative messaging through social media and other formats (currently the subject of my 2019-2023 National Science Foundation [NSF]-funded project). Yet as I argue in my chapter in the Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration (2019), Australia’s harsh border policing has become a global model for restrictive approaches to asylum, but is not foolproof. My ethnographic fieldwork and policy analysis suggests that despite the militarization and securitization of Australia’s maritime boundaries, pushback at multiple scales, from the individuals who filmed the tow-back of their boat to Indonesia and the groups of migrant detainees who advocate for their release from immigration detention, to the reluctance of regional partners, such as Indonesia, to cooperate with externalization projects prevents Australian border enforcement from uniformly deterring asylum seekers. However, Australia’s restrictive enforcement model is spreading throughout the Global North.  

​Border enforcement, intimacy & family

Through research grounded in a feminist geographical epistemology, I’ve focused in particular on how border enforcement practices impact migrants’ family lives, intimate relationships, and community networks. In a special issue I edited for Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, I developed the concept of political geographies of fertility, arguing that an approach that foregrounds fertility throughout the life course highlights how fertilities transforms ‘the political’ at every scale, from the body to the nation-state. I use autoethnographic analysis to describe how, for instance, in the UK, policies known as the “Hostile Environment” employ discomfort as a strategy to deter migrants, who are envisioned as a both racialized and medicalized threat to the UK body politic (Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2020). Autoethnography also grounds my analysis of migrant advocate’s trauma resulting from their work with asylum seekers (Emotion, Society and Space, 2017). Recently, I’ve begun work exploring how the expanding scope of border enforcement involves deterrence projects targeting not only the potential migrant, but also builds on their intimate relationships and community networks (Progress in Human Geography, in press). This work builds on feminist geopolitical scholarship and contributes to debates about how sovereignty works with and through social institutions such as the family to dissuade senses of national belonging in new ways.  ​

Intersections of settler colonial and border logics 

Through my work in locations such as Australia, I’ve pushed to understand immigration enforcement efforts alongside settler colonial control practices, topics which are rarely studied together. Interrogating histories of Aboriginal containment in northern Australia (Political Geography, 2017), has been central to understanding the continued presence of immigration detention in some of the same locations, and framing Australia’s public response to asylum seekers within the context of continued struggles over belonging and colonial legacies highlights the multiple exclusions upon which Australian national identity has been constructed. In my chapter for Changing geographies of the state: New spaces of geopolitics (2020), for instance, I frame indigenous nationalisms as an ongoing challenge to the settler state, an argument that also underpins a methodological critique I co-authored for the edited volume Power and Agency in Migration (in press). Insights from settler colonial studies, migration studies, and international law underpin these interdisciplinary comparisons and contribute to the expansion of political geographical thinking on borders and exclusion.  

Convergence of migration governance practices across sites and scales

This direction of my scholarship employs comparative work that brings together migration governance involving disparate places, people, and political processes in order to understand the underlying logics that frame their experiences. By comparing migration control practices in Thailand with those in the UK, for instance, my work published in Transactions of the Institution of British Geographers (2018) highlights the increasingly similar ad hoc and arbitrary governance of migrants in both places. Migration scholars often separate countries in the Global North from the Global South, or unproblematically use concepts developed in the Global North to understand the Global South, but here I describe similar practices emerging in each region simultaneously that are limiting opportunities for protection for asylum seekers. Similarly, in my co-authored piece in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2020), we use comparisons between cases in the US, UK, and Thailand to argue for the expanding role of destitution as a mechanism of border control. My research exploring the use of cashless debit cards in Australia and the UK published in the Geographical Review (2019) demonstrated how impoverishment had become central to bordering practices in both countries.

Feminist epistemology and methods 

Each of these research areas are informed by my ongoing interest in feminist geography, and involve multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnographic research that has the potential for innovative methodological development and theoretical complexity as well as engagement with local communities, nongovernmental organizations, and policymakers. Methodological innovation, informed by feminist epistemology, is central to my work. I’ve argued for the broad application of feminist geographic insights beyond simply using gender as an axis of difference for analysis (Geography Compass, 2015) and pushed for open, transparent and reflexive reflection about subject positionality and context during research (Research for All, 2019). In particular, I have worked to reflect critically on the implicit and explicit demands of feminist research on migration, arguing for careful consideration of the role of voice (The Professional Geographer, 2017) and refusal (Power and Agency in Migration, in press) in migration research. Scholarship grounded in feminist research principles is particularly important when researching migration enforcement, because of the difficulty in gaining access to research sites and subjects. Using techniques such as feminist periscoping makes visible the barriers and secrecy that that the researcher must navigate, as well as the embodied positionality of the researcher, illuminating strategies of sovereign power and social relations that contextualize the project (Journal of Human Rights, 2021). Feminist principles also underpin my practice of collaboration, which is central to my work.