Dr Paolo Novak

My research is concerned with the conceptual and contextual relation between borders and migration, and the way in which this relation articulates with the development process. I seek to understand how the global structures and intimate forces conjured up by such relation are reproduced and unsettled in fluid, contingent and place-specific ways, and the political implications of these ambiguous dynamics. I develop this research agenda along three axes. First, I study the contested geographies producing and engendered by such relation, drawing from feminist and postcolonial understandings of place, space, territory and scale. Second, I study processes of institutional change, contestation, refusal and reappropriation implicated with such relation, primarily through a critical engagement with development- and migration-related border management policies and practices. Third, I strive to establish a conversation between what are often pitched as contrasting and opposing epistemological understandings of such relation, primarily through my teaching practices and secondary research activities.                                                                     

My current research on asylum infrastructure and the humanitarian border seeks to bring these different strands in a more direct conversation with each other. Titled Buildings of Refuge, this research project aims at developing the concept of postcoloniality of asylum infrastructure to intervene in a series of debates associated with the management of EU borders and the so-called European migration crisis.              

                                
I have  conducted field research in Peshawar (Pakistan), Macerata (Italy), Meghalaya (India), Cairo (Egypt).