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
2018–present
Associate professor, University of Birmingham
2014–2017
Senior research associate, University of Bristol
2013–2013
Research associate, University of Exeter
Education
2014
University of Oxford, DPhil
Publications
2023
Emotional governance and immigration controls, Identities
2021
The UK’s hostile environment: Deputising immigration control, Critical Social Policy
2019
‘My passport is just my way out of here’. Mixed-immigration status families, immigration enforcement and the citizenship implications, Identities
2017
Seeking asylum and the politics of family, Families, Relationships and Societies
2017
Foreign, Criminal: a doubly damned modern British folk-devil, Citizenship Studies
2015
‘Here, man is nothing!’ Gender and Policy in an Asylum Context, Men and Masculinities
2014
Out of Time: the Temporal Uncertainties of Refused Asylum Seekers and Immigration Detainees, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
2013
Griffiths, M. Living with Uncertainty: Indefinite Immigration Detention, Journal of Legal Anthropology
2012
Anonymous Aliens: Questions of Identification in the Detention and Deportation of Failed Asylum Seekers, Population, Space and Place
2012
‘Vile liars and truth distorters’: Truth, trust and the asylum system, Anthropology Today