The Department of Political Science welcomes Lisa Marie Borrelli, a visiting scholar working with William Walters.
“My research interests circle around the broader concepts of exclusion and banishment, including a focus on how noncitizens’ rights are restricted by states in the fields of migration law, welfare policies and public administration. I am interested in ethnographic approaches and qualitative methodologies to study decision-making of (non)state actors, bureaucratic practices, policy discourses and legal case work.
Currently I conduct research at the intersection of migration law, social policies and welfare rights, with a special interest in how social assistance and integration requirements become measures of exclusion for foreign nationals throughout the European context. In this multi-sited, ethnographic study, I trace the everyday work of social services, legal counsellors and migration offices in Sweden, Germany and Switzerland, working at the intersection of social and migration law. These so-called frontline actors negotiate the right to remain of noncitizens that are either relying on social assistance or are deemed not to be integrated. Their discourses and interpretation of laws and policies thus become paramount when studying noncitizens’ rights, influencing noncitizens’ deportability. The study further discloses the use of discretion, communicational strategies between various actors, discriminating socio-legal discourses and the proliferation of migration law into other policy areas. This undermines certain safeguards for noncitizens and increases their vulnerability.”