As a Research Fellow on the ‘Business of Bordering’ project led by Professor Mayblin, Karen works on the Danish side of the project, mapping out the companies and stakeholders involved in, and profiting from, the border security economy in Denmark.
More broadly, Karen is interested in migrant resistance and humanitarianism. Her work explores forms of collective organisation, protests, solidarity and resistance by people displaced internally due to political violence in Colombia. It centres the role of humanitarian discourses, policies, and spaces in enabling and motivating these practices, and how this resistance has reworked and challenged power relations in the country.
Karen has taught across a range of UK universities, including the University of Bath, Queen Mary University of London, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Birmingham, and SOAS, University of London. She holds a PhD in Development Studies and a BA in Swahili and Development Studies from SOAS, as well as an MSc in Conflict Studies from the LSE.