This website is both a digital companion to my doctoral research and also a platform to communicate what research is forthcoming.
In Progress:
Border Multiplicity (article manuscript) Examines how EU mobility governance differentiates access and belonging through layered bordering infrastructures. Target journal: Environment and Planning C.
Deathnography and Border Deaths in Malta (article manuscript) Develops a methodological framework for tracing border deaths and interrogates the epistemological limits of representing absent migrant subjects.
Postcolonial Mobility Pathways in the EU Regime of Borders (Postdoc Project) Comparative ethnographic study of mobility pathways and bureaucratic bordering across Portugal, France and the Netherlands.
Counter-mapping Malta (book project) Based on doctoral research examining institutional bordering practices and multimodal methodologies in the Central Mediterranean (see next).
Completed Research:
Counter-mapping Malta: A study of the regime of borders through structures & noncitizen subjectivities
The MY THESIS part of this website showcases the research & creative outputs that emerged from four ethnographic fieldwork trips which took place over three years. I approached this research as a “patchwork ethnography” (Günel, Varma and Watanabe, 2020), a style of research which allows for time in an out of the field. This research was conducted in Malta between 2021 and 2023. The primary goal of this research was to define and “locate” Malta’s borders by prioritizing the phenomenological, subjective experience of borders through the narratives & experiences of those who crossed them. This counter-mapping then accounts for borders not only as physical lines on maps, legal thresholds or facts (Agnew, 1994, 2008, 2010) but rather borders as lived, felt, sensed, (at times continually) navigated phenomena.
At the heart of this study is a diverse group of border-crossers, whose perceptions, interpretation, experiences, imaginaries, understandings and narratives reveal how borders are produced, enacted and reproduced in everyday life. I have immense gratitude for their generosity – they shared their time, their stories and their perspectives. Their border experiences illuminate the tensions between borders-as-structure and borders-as-encounter; their subjectivities offer insight into how bordering practices shape – and are shaped – by noncitizens in motion, on the move, migrating, in stasis…all that can be characterized as their migratory worlds.
What emerged was a border ethnography attuned to multiplicity, relationality and the ethics of listening. This all became possible through the processes of listening, recording, thinking, writing, creating visuals, maps and a soundscape. This site presents both the analytic and creative dimensions of counter-mapping Malta – inviting viewers to think with & through borders in divergent ways.
deconstructing b/orders. 