(MENAFN- The Conversation)

• Associate Professor, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham

Profile Articles Activity

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) ( 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

Grants and Contracts

• 2025 British Academy mid career Fellowship Role: PI Funding Source: British Academy
• 2014 ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship Role: PI Funding Source: Economic and Social Research Council

Honours

Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (2018+)

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