Staff profile

I am an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at Durham University. My research looks at refugee resettlement, community sponsorship and humanitarian governance. I focus in particular on the volunteers and civil society actors who are increasingly central to how refugees are welcomed and supported in the UK and beyond. Before joining Durham in 2026, I completed a Global Challenges-funded PhD in Social Policy at the University of Birmingham (2025). While there, I was a founding member of the Refugee Sponsorship Research Hub at the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS), where I remain an Honorary Research Fellow.

My work sits across political geography, migration studies and social policy. I use qualitative and creative methods, including walking interviews and photo-elicitation, to understand how place, relationships and everyday encounters shape refugee support. My research has been funded by the ESRC, Research England and the University of Birmingham.

My current research has three connected strands:

- Hospitality, power and politicisation in community sponsorship. My doctoral research was the first study to follow UK Community Sponsorship volunteers across the full sponsorship process: before refugees arrive, during resettlement, and after formal support ends. From this work I developed the concept of “negotiated hospitality”, which treats sponsorship as an evolving relationship in which power is constantly reshaped, rather than a one-off act of welcome. My fellowship builds on this to examine how volunteers who start out with humanitarian motivations come to take up advocacy and everyday forms of political action.

- Named sponsorship and the changing governance of refugee protection. The UK Government has committed to making sponsorship a central route for refugee resettlement and to introducing named sponsorship. I am examining how these models, in which volunteers help decide who reaches protection, redistribute responsibility between the state and civil society. I am also developing a larger project that will follow named sponsorship as it is rolled out and compare it with international examples.

- Sponsorship policy and practice in the UK and Europe. With colleagues at Birmingham, I have evaluated the UK’s three sponsorship programmes (Community Sponsorship, Homes for Ukraine and Communities for Afghans) and examined public attitudes to refugee sponsorship. I co-edited a special issue of the Journal of International Migration and Integration on community sponsorship and complementary pathways. I am also a co-organiser of the Active Refugee Admissions group of the German Network for Forced Migration Studies.

I work closely with policymakers and practitioners, and I have contributed to a number of policy reports and briefs. I have provided evidence to the Home Office and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, given evidence to the European Union Agency for Asylum, submitted written evidence to the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee, and taken part as an invited expert in two parliamentary roundtables on refugee sponsorship.

• My research interests sit at the intersection of political geography, migration studies and social policy. I am interested in how refugee protection is increasingly delivered through communities and civil society, and in what this means for power, responsibility and belonging. My work explores hospitality and welcome, volunteering and politicisation, and the changing relationship between the state and civil society in migration governance. I am also interested in migrant health and community-based care, and in creative, participatory methods that capture the role of place in everyday encounters.
• - Refugee resettlement and complementary pathways
• - Community and named sponsorship of refugees
• - Hospitality, welcome and host–guest relations
• - Volunteering, humanitarianism and politicisation
• - Power and everyday politics in refugee support
• - State–civil society relations in migration governance
• - Migration policy and practice in the UK and Europe
• - Migrant health and community-based care
• - Qualitative, creative and mobile methods (walking interviews, photo-elicitation)
• - Co-production and research–policy engagement

• 2026: ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow (NINE DTP):
• 2026: Honorary Research Fellow - University of Birmingham:
• 2026: Coordinator - Active Refugee Admission Network, German :