Overview
My research focuses on the ways in which border control practices are enacted in the UK, with a particular focus on the intersections between bureaucracy and violence, as well as how such practices become contested within certain spaces.
Before embarking on my PhD, I worked for a charity in east London working with vulnerable migrants, and for a consultancy in Addis Ababa, with a focus on improving services aimed at the Somali refugee community.
I am funded by the ESRC and am a member of the University of Exeter Doctoral College and the South West Doctoral Training Centre and of the Space, Politics and Society research group.
Conference presentations:
2018 - 'Thresholds to precarity: an ethnography of a Home Office Reporting Centre', for Destitution Economies: Mapping Relations of Enforced Precarity, Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, New Orleans.
2017 - 'Reimagining Violence: Everyday life in immigration detention', Neuchâtel Graduate Conference of Migration and Mobility Studies, NCCR-on the move, University of Neuchâtel.
2016 – ‘Civilised brutality?’, International Conference on Migration, Irregularisation and Activism, University of Malmö.
Publications
Key publications | Publications by category | Publications by year
Publications by category
Reports
Gill N, Allsopp J, Burridge A, Fisher D, Griffiths M, Hambly J, Hynes J, Paszkiewicz N, Rotter R, Schmid-Scott A, et al (2020).
Experiencing Asylum Appeals 34 Ways to Improve Access to Justice at the First-tier Tribunal. Author URL.
Publications by year
2021
Schmid-Scott A (2021). Bureaucracy, Violence, Resistance: an account of Home Office reporting in Britain.
Abstract:
Bureaucracy, Violence, Resistance: an account of Home Office reporting in Britain
Scholarship on asylum often overlooks bureaucracy, folding its associated sites and practices into the broader, more overtly violent spaces and systems in which they take place. Yet, this thesis demonstrates that contributions which only focus on overt or more visible forms of violence are not necessarily indicative of asylum seekers’ daily experiences. They also inadequately reflect how a modern state governs the lives of those seeking asylum, from the everyday intimate experience of state-enforced destitution, through to the structural dynamics that threaten and enforce the detainment and removal of individuals from Britain; though seemingly disparate experiences, both are part of a broader political agenda for making life unliveable for unwanted migrants. Making connections across these different modes of violence and the logics through which they operate underpins the aims of this thesis.
Based on 16-months of ethnographic fieldwork, including 11-months as a Signing Support volunteer at a Home Office reporting centre, I argue that Home Office reporting provides a critical site for understanding how these various modes of violence come together. By drawing together aspects of Hannah Arendt’s poignant analysis of bureaucracy with feminist theorisations of violence, I argue that the threat of physical force plays a constitutive role in creating a politically induced condition of precarity amongst asylum seekers. Yet, as I will explore, these sites can never fully extinguish the possibility of resistance and by appropriating a Rancièrian notion of dissensus, I show how both asylum seekers and Signing Support volunteers who offer support to those reporting, find ways to disrupt the ‘going-on-being’ of these operations. I argue that these forms of resistance have oftentimes, indeterminate political outcomes, yet are an important form of politics in momentarily challenging these operations.
Abstract.
2020
Gill N, Allsopp J, Burridge A, Fisher D, Griffiths M, Hambly J, Hynes J, Paszkiewicz N, Rotter R, Schmid-Scott A, et al (2020).
Experiencing Asylum Appeals 34 Ways to Improve Access to Justice at the First-tier Tribunal. Author URL.
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