Bridget Anderson is the Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship. 

Bridget has a DPhil in Sociology and previous training in Philosophy and Modern Languages. Her most recent book is the edited volume Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race (BUP 2025). She is the author of Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books, 2000). She co-edited Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy with Martin Ruhs (Oxford University Press, 2010 and 2012), The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation with Matthew Gibney and Emanuela Paoletti (Springer, 2013) and Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy and Politics with Isabel Shutes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)..

Bridget takes as her starting point that the 'migrant' and the 'citizen' and the differences between them are constructed in law and in social and political practice. Research also plays an important role in this, raising important ethical, epistemological and political questions. She is interested in the relation between migration, race, and nation, historically and in the contemporary world. She understands the mobility of people in the context of mobilities of goods, finance and ideas, mobilities whose speed and patterns are significantly changing in the face of technological developments. Her work explores the relations between migration, temporalities and future making claims, with a particular focus on precarity, labour market flexibilities and citizenship rights. She has pioneered an understanding of functions of immigration in essential economic sectors. Bridget looks to generate new forms of knowledge by engaging with diverse epistemologies, including activist, artistic, and community-based knowledges and has worked closely with migrants’ organisations, trades unions and legal practitioners at local, national and international levels.

Please note that Bridget has reached capacity in terms of the number of students she is able to supervise and is therefore unable to consider new PhD applicants until 2026.