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Migration, Displacement and Asylum Research Stream

An illustration of figures walking holding hands with a sunset in the background

This stream will explore how legal, political, environmental and socio-cultural frameworks shape experiences and systems of migration, displacement, and asylum (whether domestic or international).  This might include work on lived experiences, policy and practice, or more critical perspectives on questions of power, race, colonial histories, identity, demonisation and belonging. This list is not exhaustive.

We advocate for public engagement and activism.

We welcome new members from any related discipline – please contact the co-leads, Raxona Khanum or Aby Eiluorior.

Themes:

  • AI and Digital Practices in Migration Law and Governance
  • Children and Migration
  • Prisons, Detention and Deportation
  • Health, Trauma and Wellbeing
  • Identity, Belonging and Diversity
  • Internal Bordering, Devolution and Brexit
  • International and Comparative Refugee Law
  • Immigration Law and Asylum Law: Doctrine, Teaching and Practice
  • Forced and Internal Displacement (including environmental)
  • Colonial Histories, Race and Power
  • Social and Educational Inclusivity of Migrants
  • Statelessness and Citizenship
  • Trafficking, Exploitation and Modern Slavery

Members:

Publications:

  • Kerrigan, N., Breen, D. and Bakkali, Y. (2025). Liquid racism: Brexit, education and road culture. In Liquid Racism. Bristol University Press. 

  • Kerrigan, N.A. (2025). Rural being: Merleau‐Ponty, embodied perception and intersectionality. Sociologia Ruralis, 65(1), p.e12501.

  • Kerrigan, N. and de Lima, P. eds. (2023). The Rural-Migration Nexus: Global Problems, Rural Issues. Springer Nature.

  • Lewis, Z., Clark, T., Vincent, K., Patel, V. & Munyard, J. (2025) Early childhood studies graduates in the workplace: Experiences and perceptions. https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/16484/ 

  • Lewis, Z. (2022) Creative encounters: a new materialist interpretation of creativity in early childhood education. EdD thesis, University of Sheffield. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/30765/
  • Nahaboo, Z. and Kerrigan, N. (2021). Migrants, borders and the European question: the Calais jungle. Springer Nature
  • O’Sullivan, A. (Forthcoming). Irish rEUnification? Post-Brexit futures of nostalgia and nostophobia among the Irish diaspora. Memory Studies.
  • O’Sullivan, A., Breen, D., and Kerrigan, N. (2025). Not-so-critical race theory: a retort to Hodgkinson et al’s ‘critical assessment’ of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK. Justice, Power and Resistance (published online ahead of print 2025), available from: < https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000033> 
  • O’Sullivan, A. et al. (2023) Global Surpluses of Extraction and Slow Climate Violence: A Sociological Framework. Sociological inquiry. [Online] 93 (2), 320–340.
  • O’Sullivan, A. (2023) Teaching Activist Criminology in the Neoliberal University. In The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology (pp. 365-379). Emerald Publishing Limited.
  • Omukuti, J. and O'Sullivan, A. (2023) The Green Climate Fund as an Elaborate Scheme of Generating Social Harms. In Climate Justice in the Majority World (pp. 105-122). Routledge.
  • Reszczynski, F. (2023). English language learners dealing with trauma: Developing ESL teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills. In Diversity and inclusion in English language education: Supporting learning through research and practice (pp. 189–204). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003258865-12 
  • Thomas, M. and Stevens, A. (2026). “Straight away I was aware that I was Black”: Conceptualising the racialised pains of maternal imprisonment in England. Incarceration: An International Journal of Imprisonment, Detention and Coercive Confinement, 7: https://doi.org/10.1177/26326663261456388
  • Redshaw, S., Thomas, C., Kerrigan, N., Krivokapic-Skoko, B. and Flynn, S. (2025). Rurality and intersectionality: a literature review. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 44(9), pp.208-226.

Research projects

  • Immigration Law Project (SETLEP Grant £1000, 2024). (Raxona Khanum).

Relevant research (including PhDs):

  • Fátima’s PhD research focuses on exploring the experiences and perceptions of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students and teachers on issues of migration, mental health, and self-harming behaviour.  
  • Nathan’s research sits across community studies, rural studies and late modern social theory. His work is concerned with how social change is experienced through and within place, with a particular interest in community, belonging and the enactment of informal social control through which boundaries are drawn between insiders and outsiders.
  • Raxona’s PhD research is titled ‘Governing Love: Affective Atmospheres and Colonial Legacies’. The thesis contributes to research on the relationship between emotion, affect, atmospheres and immigration law. 
  • Zoe’s scholarship focuses on early childhood education, outdoor learning and creative pedagogies, and is interested in creative and participatory research methods that promote the voices of young children.

Partnerships and consultancy work:

  • TBC 

Educational practice and clinic work:

  • Annual field trip to national museums around migration.
  • Immigration Law Clinic

Associated partners and networks:

  • Coventry Irish Society
  • Coventry Refugee Centre
  • Local Early Years
  • Migrant Help
  • Migration Museum (London)
  • Migration in Remote and Rural Areas network
  • RMC
  • Refugee Action
  • SolidariTee
  • St Chad’s Sanctuary
  • Wolverhampton Refugee Centre