Personal profile

Research interests

My research interests include immigration detention and borders, state violence and harm, migration and masculinities, and racism. As an activist-sociologist and interdisciplinary researcher, I collaborate closely with practitioners and civil society organisations in my work.

My doctoral research begins with the observation that men are disproportionately detained in Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) in the UK, yet research that considers the gendered dimensions of male detainment is rare. Through an ethnography of IRCs, I argue in my thesis, Men, masculinities, and the temporal necropolitics of UK immigration detention (2022), that detainment can be profoundly harmful, and that this harm results from systemic and instrumental violence. Furthermore, I contend that detention’s violence operates across two distinct yet interactional temporalities – slow and fast – and through multiple interrelated sites including the state, families, bodies and the IRC itself. These many forms of suffering are conceptualised as facets of postcolonial necropower, which exposes detainees to the threat of death and injury. While some are able to survive and resist in complex and contested ways, I contend, crucially, that detention’s violence is both gendered – mediated and experienced through intersectional gendered divisions and processes – and gendering – acting upon the production and performance of detainees’ masculinities.

Other recent collaborative research looks at the racist politics of the 2024 UK riots and the limitations of the carceral response (2025), as well as exploration of 'paradoxical representation' by elite Conservative politicians from ethnic minority backgrounds who actively harm racialised migrant communities and act as 'post-racial gatekeepers' (2024).

I am a member of Migration Mobilities Bristol, Bristol Social Harm and Crime Research Group, The Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice and The Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship. 

Research Groups and Themes

  • Migration Mobilities Bristol
  • SPAIS Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship
  • SPS Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice

Keywords

  • Migration
  • Immigration detention
  • Masculinities
  • Racism
  • Borders
  • Harm
  • Social Justice
  • Violence

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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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