Geographies of migration

Malene H. Jacobsen, PhD

ABOUT

I am a critical human geographer working at the intersection of political geography, critical refugee studies, and feminist and postcolonial theory. Topics of particular interest include: racial politics of forced migration, refugee law, the interconnections of (neo)colonialism, warfare, and refuge, as well as community-engaged research practices. My research focuses empirically on forced migration in and across Europe and the Middle East. I am currently a NUAcT Fellow at Newcastle University. I earned my doctorate from the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky (2019).

Research projects

Geographies of asylum justice: the lived realities and spaces of the Danish asylum procedure (Justasylum)

This research explored the juridical border work at play in the asylum procedure. Through a feminist intersectional approach, this project uncovered how this legal process of deciding who obtains asylum is constituted spatially, carried out in practice, and experienced by the actors involved. It was funded by the European Commission, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship (Jan 2022-Dec 2023)

Precarious Protection: Syrian and Somali Struggles for Refuge in Denmark

The research project examined the changing nature of refugee protection. In the wake of recent global refugee crises, several countries have introduced new temporary protection statuses for refugees, signaling that they will be protected only temporarily. This research project interrogated these shifts in strategies of migration management in European states and their broader significance with respect to the legal provision refugee protection as enshrined in international law. This project was funded by the Irish Research Council (Oct 2019-Nov 2021).

Selected Publications

2023

- Refusing the Gift of Welfare: Syrians' Encounters with the Danish State. Social Sciences 2023, 12(6), 351.

- A feminist geopolitics of living: Syrians’ struggles to maintain and reunite intimate ties across borders. Gender, Place and Culture 2023, 30(9), 1303-1324.

2022

- Wars in Refuge: Locating Syrians’ intimate knowledges of violence across time and space. Political Geography 2022, 92, 102488.

- Precarious (Dis)Placement: Temporality and the Legal Rewriting of Refugee Protection in Denmark. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 2022, 112(3), 819-827.

2021

- The ethics and politics of migration research. Dialogues in Human Geography 2021, 11(1), 69-72.

- Practical Engagements in Legal Geography: Collaborative Feminist Approaches to Immigration Advocacy in Denmark. AREA 2021, 53(4), 595-602.

Upcoming events and talks

University of Kentucky, USA – Research talk

University of South Carolina, USA – Research talks

King’s College London, UK – Forced Separation workshop