Dr Griffiths leads research on deportation, the 'hostile environment' and new developments in immigration enforcement. Her fellowship will focus on The Home Office in the Home: Mixed-citizenship families and immigration policing.
“Amidst the divisive and reductive UK immigration debates, this project aims to positively intervene by illuminating our interconnections. That includes highlighting the ways that harsh immigration policing affects us all, including British citizens.”
Associate Professor Dr Melanie Griffiths
The Fellowship will focus on families made up of British citizens and foreign nationals with insecure or illegalised immigration status in the UK. By combining new research with previously unpublished material, the project creates the UK’s first longitudinal study of precarious mixed-citizenship families.
It will shed a new light on critical blind spots, including the family lives of illegalized migrants and the implications of a parent’s insecure immigration status on British children’s wellbeing and identities
The project will include development of innovative coproduced public engagement initiatives, working with families, social workers, lawyers, and NGOs to diversify, humanise, and better-inform immigration debates.
Dr Griffiths has spent 15 years researching the UK’s immigration and asylum systems. She has written on multiple aspects of these systems, including asylum appeals, immigration detention, deportation, immigration bureaucracy, and issues around time, ‘truth’, uncertainty, criminalisation, masculinity, and emotion.
