Staff Profile

  • Isabel joined the University of Northampton in December 2019 following a position as postdoctoral researcher in the Space and Political Agency Group at Tampere University. Her research interests are broadly centred around the politics of asylum, bordering, post-colonialism, solidarity, race and emotions, with a particular focus on collaborative ethnographic methods. Isabel holds a PhD from the University of East London where she was a recipient of the Excellence Scholarship. Drawing on her own experience as activist in the UK and Germany, her PhD thesis explored how bordering is unfolding in the 21st century and how people most affected by these practices keep finding spaces of political possibility, and through collaborative ways can report their everyday realities. Her ongoing conversations with forty people in the asylum system at protest events, demonstrations, activist group meetings but more significantly in her intimate relationships and the everyday, contemplated the construction of contemporary political spaces, the role of affect and emotion within them, and asylum seekers´ precarious positioning.

    • ’Race’, Ethnicity and Migration in Britain (SOC2113)
    • ’Race’, Ethnicity and Migration in Britain (SOC3057)
    • Organisations (SOCM085)
    • Sociology Dissertation Project (SOCM087)
    • Undergraduate and Postgraduate dissertation Supervision
  • Isabel´s current research interests are oriented around four main areas:

    1. The emotional politics of bordering: the politics of dis/comfort, disappointment, alienation and shame; emotional labour and its entanglements with bordering practices;
    2. The politics of time, temporality and the possibility of politics opening up in the present moment,
    3. Postcolonial and decolonial theory and borders,
    4. Political possibilities beyond citizenship.