Dr Melanie Griffiths BA (Oxon), MA, DPhil

PhD (DPhil) in Social Anthropology, University of Oxford (COMPAS and ISCA)

MA in the Anthropology of Development, SOAS University of London

Migration, asylum, immigration detention, deportation, families, Article 8 rights, gender, men and masculinity, time, bureaucracies, legal courts, hostile environment

Dr Griffiths is an Associate Professor in Human Geography, having joined the University of Birmingham under the prestigious Birmingham Fellow scheme in 2018. She specialises in immigration and asylum and has led a number of migration-related projects. She has written on judicial and bureacratic migration processes, gender, family life, time, uncertainty, and emotions in relation to migration.

This inclues 'Raising Children', a collaborative project with the University of Liverpool analysing the extent to which children's best interests are examined in parental deportation decisions. The policy-focused report and recommendations were published in December 2025 (https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/raising-children-safeguarding-children-in-parental-deportation-de/ ). 

Between 2014-17, Dr Griffiths was Principal Investigator of an ESRC Future Research Leaders project at the University of Bristol, working on the family lives and Article 8 rights of 'mixed-immigration status' families and men at risk of deportation. (The report is available here: https://pure-oai.bham.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/135583533/Deportability_Families_report_2021.pdf). In 2025, she was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to conduct longitudinal research with these families; re-interviewing them a decade on.  

Earlier research includes working as an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter in 2013, working with Professor Nick Gill on an ESRC-funded project looking at cultures of asylum appeals across different Tribunal hearing centres.

Her DPhil research was conducted at the University of Oxford, on the British asylum system, with a particular focus on refused asylum seekers and immigration detainees. It considered the role and negotiation of identification requirements in the asylum system. 

Migration broadly (including irregular, undocumented, family, asylum, EEA nationals), immigration enforcement and incarceration, ‘foreign criminals’ discourse, the hostile environment, time, men and masculinity, family life and Article 8 rights, belonging and citizenship, bureaucracies, law and the judiciary, identity and identifications. 

• Member of the management committee: Right to Remain (NGO), 2024 - ongoing
• Chair of trustees: Open Door (NGO), 2011 - ongoing
• Member of the Detention Forum (NGO network), since 2011