Our people

Dr Victoria Canning

Victoria Canning is senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. She has spent over a decade working on the rights of women seeking asylum, specifically on support for survivors of sexual violence and torture. She recently completed an ESRC Research Leaders Fellowship focussing on harmful practice in asylum systems in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, and the gendered implications thereof. Victoria is co-coordinator of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control and trustee at Statewatch. Her book Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System won the 2018 British Society of Criminology book prize, and she acted as consultant on the Bafta award winning documentary series Exodus: Our Journey to Europe.

Dr Monish Bhatia

Monish is a Lecturer in Criminology at the Birkbeck, University of London. He has spent over a decade working on the rights of people seeking asylum, and sits on the Boards of the Scottish Refugee Council and Right to Remain. In 2015, he was granted a prestigious Carnegie Trust funding, to carry out a study on destitution, drug use and ‘crimes’ amongst asylum seekers. In 2012-2015, Monish was a co-cordinator of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, and is currently one of the acting editors of the Justice, Power and Resistance Journal.  His co-edited volumes Media, Crime and Racism (Palgrave, Paperback) and Minorities, Crime and (In) justice were published in 2018. Monish is currently acting as a consultant for the Bezna Theatre on their play called Illegalised.

Follow Monish on Twitter: @DrMonishBhatia

Dr Anthea Vogl

Dr Anthea Vogl is a lecturer in law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research addresses refugee and migration law and racialised practices of border control, with a particular focus on the use of administrative powers and decision-making to exclude refugee and human rights law. She has published in leading local and international law journals and has worked as a senior researcher on international research grants, focused on comparative refugee and human rights law. In 2018 she was a visiting fellow at the Humbolt University Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM) and was awarded a Social Impact Practice Grant from the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion for clinical work with refugee legal organisations and service provision in Australia. She is currently researching visa cancellation practices among asylum seeker and refugee populations and the private sponsorship of humanitarian entrants in Australia.

Dr Elyse Methven

Dr Elyse Methven is a lecturer in law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research is on the criminal regulation of disorderly behaviour, and the intersection of immigration law and criminal justice. Elyse is currently working on a project with Dr Anthea Vogl on the Code of Behaviour for asylum seekers in the Australian community. The project focuses on the criminogenic nature of the Code, including how it has been used to surveil, stigmatise and increase the precarity of the asylum seeker population living in the community.

Dave Martin

Dave Martin is a PhD candidate at La Trobe University Law School. He is researching the human impacts on New Zealandcitizens (and their families) being forcibly removed from Australia underSection 501 of the Migration Act. Dave previously managed a prison organisation in Queensland for eight years.

Michelle Bui

Michelle Bui is a research assistant in the faculty of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. She is currently involved in a project called Deathscapes which seeks new ways to document, understand, and respond to contemporary racialized violence in the settler states of Australia, Canada and the United States.

Dr Synnøve Jahnsen

Synnøve Jahnsen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Uni Search Rokkan Centre in Norway.

Dr Melissa Phillips

Melissa Phillips is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne and works for the Danish Refugee Council in the area of migration, refugee protection and forced displacement. Melissa’s research focuses on transit migration, identity formation during mobility and the nexus between migration and forced displacement.

Dr Maurice Stierl

Dr Maurice Stierl obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. He now a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick.

Dr Anna Szorenyi

Dr Anna Szorenyi has a PhD from the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at Monash University, and lectures in the Department of Gender Studies and Social Analysis at the University of Adelaide. She researches in the area of feminist ethics and global migration, with particular interests in cultural constructions of asylum and trafficking.

Dr Samantha Currie

Dr Samantha Currie’s research specialises in aspects of European Union law and migration and gender and migration. Specifically, her work has covered migration in the context of the EU’s eastern enlargement, Union citizenship, the cross-border posting of workers in the EU, and women migrants in irregular employment. She is currently a senior lecturer in the Law faculty at the University of Liverpool.

Dr Samanthi Gunawardana

Dr Samanthi Gunawardana’s research interests include rural women, labour and global political economy in South Asia, with an emphasis on internal and international migrant workers. Samanthi has published on organizing women workers and she is currently working on a USAID funded report on the Sri Lankan labour movement’s response to migrant workers. She is currently a Senior Lecture in Gender and Development at Monash University.

Professor Katja Franko Aas

Professor Katja Franko Aas is Professor in Criminology at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at The University of Oslo, and a collaborator at The Border Crossing Observatory (BOb). Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and studied at the University of Ljubljana where she graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1996.

Dr Maria João Guia

Dr Maria João Guia is author of a PhD thesis on ‘Immigration, violent crime and crimmigration’ at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. She is Associate Researcher at the Center of Human Rights, at the Faculty of Law, University of Coimbra.

Professor Jean-Pierre Cassarino

Professor Jean-Pierre Cassarino is a Senior Research Fellow at the European Neighbourhood Policy Chair of the College of Europe. He is also a an associate research at the Research Institute on Contemporary Maghreb (IRMC). He was previously based at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS) of the European University Institute (EUI, Florence, Italy). He has researched and published extensively on migration, particularly on return migration, state-to-state cooperation on readmission/removal of unauthorised persons and the observance of their human rights.

Associate Professor Kelly Sundberg

Dr. Kelly Sundberg an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, Justice, and Policy Studies at the Mount Royal University. He is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Law at the University of Adelaide and a Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary. He is also a Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Prior to his academic career, he served fourteen years in various investigative and enforcement positions with what that today is the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

Dr Erin O’Brien

Dr Erin O’Brien is a Lecturer in the School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She researches agenda-setting, policy-making and political activism on issues of sex, gender, and justice, and is particularly concerned with the interplay between activists and the state in the construction of knowledge and formation of policy.

Professor Vanessa Barker

Vanessa Barker is Docent and Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University and the Associate Director of Border Criminologies.  She has published recent work on democracy and deportation, border control and ethnicity, and the welfare state and comparative penal sanctioning. In the US, she works on questions about the prison and the public sphere.

Associate Professor Raquel Matos

Raquel Matos is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Catholic University of Portugal. She is the Director of the Research Centre for Human Development at the Catholic University of Portugal. She researches gender, migration and detention.

Associate Professor Anne McNevin

Anne McNevin is an Associate Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. Prior to this position she was a Lecturer in Politics at Monash University. Anne’s research is focused on the implications of displacement, border control, and irregular migration for the contemporary transformation of sovereignty, citizenship, governance and political community.

Assistant Professor Gabriella E Sanchez

Gabriella Sanchez (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is Assistant Professor at the University of Texas El Paso. A socio-cultural anthropologist by training she researches clandestine and criminalized forms of labor along borders from a critical criminology perspective.

Professor Joanne van der Leun

Dr Joanne van der Leun is a Professor of Criminology at Leiden Law School the Netherlands. She specializes in migration, crime and policy. She supervises the Bachelor and Masters Curriculum in Leiden. In her current research, Joanne van der Leun focuses on the effects of the convergence of criminal law and migration policies.

Professor Marjorie Zatz

A Fulbright Senior Specialist from Arizona State University (ASU), Professor Marjorie Zatz was a visiting scholar at the Monash University School of Political and Social Inquiry (PSI) and The Border Crossing Observatory (BOb) in 2012.

Dr Tiziana Torresi

Dr Tiziana Torresi received a BA Hons. from the University of New South Wales, and her DPhil in Politics and International Relations from the University of Oxford, where she also held a lectureship in Politics at Worcester College. Dr Torresi is now currently a Lecture at the University of Adelaide.

Associate Professor Savitri Taylor

A Border Crossing Observatory Collaborator, Savitri Taylor is an Associate Professor in the School of Law at La Trobe University. Her research over the past 20 years has focused on refugee law and asylum policy at the national, regional and international level.

Associate Professor Marinella Marmo

Associate Professor Marinella Marmo researches in the areas of international criminal justice, (including European Union) transnational crime and comparative criminology. She currently works in the area of migration, border control and trafficking in human beings.

Professor Nancy Wonders

Professor Nancy Wonders is a criminologist and political sociologist at Northern Arizona University. For more than a decade, she has conducted comparative, international research that explores how borders are being reconstructed and performed at key border sites in response to globalization.

Professor Doris Marie Provine

Doris Marie Provine is a Professor in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University (ASU). Her areas of interest reflect her background in law (JD Cornell) and political science (Ph.D. Cornell). Professor Provine’s current work revolves around policies concerning unauthorized immigration.

Professor Immanuel Ness

Professor Immanuel Ness is a professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (USA). His research focuses on the political economy and marginalization of migrant labor. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Social Change, University of Johannesburg.

Professor Dean Wilson

Professor Dean Wilson from the University of Sussex, UK, has published widely on surveillance including biometrics and border technologies.

Professor Maartje van der Woude

Dr Maartje van der Woude is a Professor of Law and Society and the Ledien University in the Netherlands. She is the current chair in the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Goverancy and Society. She obtained a degree in both Criminal Law (LLM) and Criminology (MSc) from Ledien University. In her current research, she focuses on the effects of the convergence of criminal law and migration policies.

Professor Thomas Ugelvik

Professor Thomas Ugelvik has a PhD in criminology from the University of Oslo. His PhD research was an ethnography of prisoner subjectivation processes in and through the everyday life and power struggles of the institution. His research interests also include crime and the media, gender issues, and cultural criminology.

Professor Dario Melossi

Dario Melossi is a Professor of Criminology in the School of Law of the University of Bologna. His current research concerns the process of construction of deviance and social control within the European Union, especially with regard to migration processes.

Dr Michael Grewcock

Dr Michael Grewcock is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He was a solicitor in London for 13 years, before returning to UNSW to complete his PhD in 2004. He is an expert on state crime, border policing, criminal law and criminology.