Fellows 2023

TIMOFEY BALIN

User-conceived Algorithmized Platform Interaction and the Production of Confidence and Trust on Telegram

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

ABSTRACT
This research project focuses on the intersection of two major themes. First, against the backdrop of alienation, polarization and misinformation effects that characterize social media algorithms today, its asks whether and how online interactions can emphasize pro-social qualities such as mutual trust and cooperation. As a starting point, some examples of Telegram chatbots are particularly interesting as they open up channels for online-to-offline interaction aimed at civil action. Secondly, given the recent proliferation of digital applications designed for meditation, combating procrastination and other mindfulness techniques, it is attempted to envisage the feasibility of online digital platforms that would lead to direct interpersonal exchanges facilitated by the use of game mechanisms and creative/artistic techniques.

BIOGRAPHY
Timofey Balin has recently completed his master's degree in sociology at the Université de Paris. His master's thesis focused on forms of platform work in Russia and France. He is currently working on a Ph.D. project that attempts to bring together his diverse areas of interest: from algorithmic user interactions to theatrical and performative creative practices. Timofey Balin also hold a B.A. and M.A. in Asian languages (Korean, Chinese) and anthropology.

LYDIA BARRETT

Sacred Songs from the Kitchen: Women's Participatory Performance and Bricolage Percussion in Trans-Saharan Perspective

University of California, Santa Cruz
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

ABSTRACT
Music is a powerful tool for examining evidence of women’s cultural exchange in the Sahara desert, where national and cultural borders remain especially flexible, but where the afterlife of colonization renders women largely disempowered from overt expressions of border resistance. In this multi-sited project, Lydia examines similarities in organology and musical form which connect participatory women’s song traditions. This project focuses on communities which have historically considered the Sahara not a wall, but a space of life and movement, though the imposition of national borders forces them to reconstitute their identities within the borders of these imagined communities. By exploring musical and organological connections among women’s participatory song traditions at the northern and southern gates of the Sahara, this project complicates the political and national borders which use this expansive territory to erroneously cleave the African continent.

BIOGRAPHY
Lydia Barrett is a Ph.D. candidate in cross-cultural musicology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Originally from South Carolina, USA, they studied vocal performance and music history at the University of Massachusetts before they took a break from music to join the US Peace Corps and teach English for two years in the Borgou region of northern Benin – where there was, of course, plenty of music! Their research interests include gender dynamics in trans-Saharan musical communities, nationalism and identity in the African postcolony, and the best way to replace eggs in baking.

MARIA BELÉN LÓPEZ

Environment and Care: Perceptions and Practices of Rural Migrant Women from the Reconquista Basin of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM)
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

ABSTRACT
This anthropological research examines how rural migrant women living in marginalized and ecologically degraded residential neighborhoods of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, Argentina, perceive and engage with environmental issues in their daily lives, and how these definitions relate to political and cultural borders in the urban context. The study focuses on migrant women's experiences towards environmental concerns and explores the borders that influence their experiences, including gender, socio-economic, cultural and migratory relations. The research uses ethnographic techniques and is part of a participatory action research project with feminist horizons that took place between 2019-2022.

BIOGRAPHY
Belén López is a doctoral student in Anthropology at the Interdisciplinary School of Higher Social Studies of the National University of San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina. Her research focuses on gender, migration, community care, and environment from situated perspectives. She carried out her field work in a Participatory Action Research project, building links with the community and networks with different local actors and community organizations, exploring interrelationships between marginalized societies and their environment. She integrates the programme Migrantas en Reconquista, of the Núcleo de Estudios Migratorios (NEMI) (IDAES-UNSAM), and The Global (De)Centre for Diversity Mobility and Culture. She also contributed to consultancy projects, applied research, and worked as a lecturer on different subjects and universities.

PUBLICATIONS
Nejamkis, L; López, M.B.; Piñeyrúa, F.; Rajoy, R., Ruggeiro M. (2023) “Estudio interdisciplinar del espacio público del río Reconquista desde la experiencia habitacional de mujeres migrantes” / “Interdisciplinary study of the public space of the Reconquista River from the housing experience of migrant women”. In Revista Campos en Ciencias Sociales - Universidad de Santo Tomás, Colombia. Dossier Ambiente y Sociedad, Vol. 11, nº 1
López, M.B. y Rajoy, R. (2022) “Stuck protagonists of community work in the new scenarios of inequality in Latin America” / “Las protagonistas truncadas del trabajo comunitario en los nuevos escenarios de desigualdad latinoamericanos”. New Approaches to Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC): FLACSO
Nejamkis, L.; López, M.B.; Rajoy, R. (2021). “Cuidado ambiental y agencia social: experiencias de mujeres migrantes en Buenos Aires” / “Enviromental care and social agency: migrant women experiences in Buenos Aires”, Revista Reflexiones - Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Costa Rica Vol. 100 Num 2, pp. 1-19. ISSN 1659 – 2859, available at: https://revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/reflexiones/article/view/42140
Castilla, V.; Canevaro, S; López, B. (2021). “Cambio climático y percepciones situadas del riesgo en la Cuenca del Río Reconquista (Buenos Aires,Argentina)”/ “Migration, Environmental Degradation, and Risk Perceptions in the Reconquista River Basin (Buenos Aires, Argentina)”, in Revista de Estudios Sociales, Dossier Cambio climático, ecología política y migraciones en Norte, Centro y Sur América, 76, pp. 41-57, available at: https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/full/10.7440/res76.2021.04

MARIA BOWLING

Borderlands as the Nation's Margins: Decolonization, State-building and Language in Angola’s Forgotten South (1950s-2010s)

N.N.
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

ABSTRACT
In theory, the southern borderlands of Angola separate Portuguese-speaking Angolans and English-speaking Namibians and Zambians. However, reality proves it to be a site of complex transnational and multilingual identity formation, as well as continued (re)negotiation of colonial legacies and post-independence nation- and state-building projects.
The project follows the evolution of language use, policy and attitudes in Angola’s southernmost provinces: Namibe, Cunene, Cuando Cubango and Huíla; between the 1950s and the 2010s. It investigates the role language has played in the lives of border populations and makes a case for using language as a heuristic tool, through which we understand the socio-historical underpinnings of present-day marginalization.

BIOGRAPHY
Maria Bowling is an independent researcher. She holds an M.A. in Political Science and a B.A. in International Studies. Her work centers Angolan history while embracing transnational approaches. Research interests include the diplomacy of non-state actors during decolonization, state- and nation-building in civil conflict, language in postcolonial Angola and family histories. Besides wanting to contribute to the academic world, she is passionate about awakening and fostering historical curiosity in her community and beyond.

SEBASTIAN CARLOTTI

Mobility or Immobility? The Complex Implementation of Legal Migration Channels between Europe and West Africa

Università di Pisa & University of Amsterdam
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

ABSTRACT
The unequal distribution of mobility rights has become a major concern for scholars and policymakers. In the last two decades, the EU actively promoted the creation of new legal mobility channels with West African countries by stimulating circular migration for study, employment, and training. Defined by the idea of a triple-win scenario, frameworks in Europe like the Global Approach to Migration encourage temporary migration channels for study and employment. In this direction the EU increasingly focused on West Africa as strategic area of origin to implement new migration channels. This project aims to investigate Member State’s visa policy to examine whether a security-oriented agenda has prevailed and if highly selective access systems dominate the relationship between Europe and West Africa.

BIOGRAPHY
Sebastian Carlotti is pursuing a joint-Ph.D. research project at the University of Pisa and the University of Amsterdam. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations obtained at the University of Pisa, writing a thesis on international protection and Sexual and Gender (SGBV) in the context of refugee camps. Sebastian then obtained his M.Sc. degree at SOAS, University of London, with a dissertation on the history and development of European border externalization in the West African region. For his Ph.D., he is working on visa policies, temporary labour mobility, and the implementation of legal migration channels between Europe and West Africa.

PUBLICATIONS
Carlotti, S. (2021). Behind the Curtain of the Border Spectacle: Introducing ‘Illegal’ Movement and Racialized Profiling in the West African Region. Social Sciences, 10 (4), pp. 1-20, available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10040139
Carlotti, S. (2021). Italy’s Health Divide: Securitised Migration Policies and their Impact on Migrant Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Migration Letters, 18 (5), pp. 507-518, available at: https://migrationletters.com/index.php/ml/article/view/1645
Carlotti, S. Paganucci, I. (2021). Distinguersi per uniformarsi. Il lavoro cognitivo nell’università tra produzione della conoscenza e mito della mobilità. The Lab’s Quarterly, XXXIII (3), pp. 273-296, available at: https://doi.org/10.13131/1724-451x.labsquarterly.axxiii.n3.273-296
Carlotti, S. (2020). Migration Policy and Health Insecurity. Italy’s Response to COVID-19 and the impact of the Security Decree. Rivista Trimestrale di Scienza Dell’Amministrazione, 2, 1-24, available at: https://doi.org/10.32049/RTSA.2020.2.14
Carlotti, S. (2020). Tampere and Legal Migration Channels: The Case of Italy. The Migration Conference 2020 Proceedings: Migration and Politics, pp. 175-178. Transnational Press: London.

NABIL FERDAOUSSI

Border Hauntology: An Ethnography of Border Death and Disappearance at the EU-Moroccan Borders

University of Cape Town
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

ABSTRACT
This dissertation project examines the entangled forms of (dis)engagement with border death and disappearance by different state and non-state actors at the EU-Moroccan borders. It explores ways in which the EU’s anti-migration policies externalize not only border control, but also death and disappearance to countries of the Global South. The EU mobilizes an armor of logistical, financial and political infrastructures to extend its externalization strategies to the realm of the dead and the disappeared. The net result is a total disengagement with death and disappearance as structural technologies of border deterrence. In light and shadow of this disengagement, this study examines counter-forensic practices of families and activists to search and identify missing and dead migrants at the EU-Moroccan borders. It explores residual forms of solidarity and activism led by families and borderland activists alike to establish truth and justice about the dead and the disappeared, while also mobilize shame against deadly regimes of border control. Conceptually grounded in spectrality, my project seeks to extend the spatiality and temporality dyads hitherto dominating scholarship in migration and border studies.

BIOGRAPHY
Nabil Ferdaoussi is a Doctoral Research Fellow at HUMA-Institute for Humanities in Africa and Ph.D. candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. His doctoral dissertation examines the politics of (dis)engagement with border death and disappearance at the EU-Moroccan borders. It brings a new conceptual framework to bear on the study of border death and disappearance. Nabil’s work broadly investigates the EU’s externalization strategies in the Maghreb region, with a sharp focus on the interlocking relationship between border control, visuality, anti-black racism and postmortem violence.

PUBLICATIONS
Ferdaoussi, Nabil. (2022). “Border Hauntology: Ghosts, Border Regimes, and the Prison-House of Necropolitics in Mati Diop’s Atlantics,” by African Social Research
Ferdaoussi, Nabil. (2022). Turning the Euro-Moroccan Tide: A Reappraisal of Migration Cooperation beyond Existing Bilateral Agreements, EuroMeSCo, IEMed.
Ferdaoussi, Nabil. (2021). ‘Regreso’: A Film Reframes the Border Spectacle on Unaccompanied Moroccan Minors at the Moroccan-Spanish Border. Border Criminologies Blog, available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2021/10/regreso-film.
Ferdaoussi, Nabil. (2021). Mati Diop’s Atlantics: Towards a Border Hauntology? Border Criminologies Blog, available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2021/10/mati-diops.

YUN JUNG KIM

Bases and Borders of the Pacific: Migrant Labor, Medical Humanitarianism, and Asian Refugees

University of Minnesota
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

ABSTRACT
Guam/Guåhan and Busan both have a long history of hosting military bases and migrant workers throughout the 20th century due to their proximity to the ocean. This dissertation project examines the medical screenings coded in the US immigration laws and the hygiene and environmental controls practiced by the local governments and military units. Through oral history interviews and archival evidence that centers the experiences of Vietnam War evacuees and local residents, this project explores how the US and South Korean governments sought to limit the permeability of their borders and expand their claims over territories and subjects.

BIOGRAPHY
Eunice (Yun Jung) Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at University of Minnesota who researches how im/migration and border policies intersect with public health practices and environmental movements. They previously worked for non-profit organizations in South Korea that focused on issues of migration, asylum, and statelessness and have been part of research projects in the US that involve Asian Americans and im/migrants. They received their M.A. in Migration and Diaspora Studies from SOAS and B.A. in Psychology and Peace Studies from University of Notre Dame.

TIMOR LANDHERR

Border Politics Beyond Limits: Spatializing Externalization and the Production of Transit States

Queen Mary University of London
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

ABSTRACT
Timor Landherr studies border externalization as a spatial intervention that absorbs contingent migrant flows into transit “migration” states. Drawing from international political sociology and historical-geographic materialism, his project argues that these states become the managers of a new mobility-fixity arrangement that negotiates the economic interests of labor mobility and the defensive desires of ethnonationalism. Building on qualitative interview data with humanitarian, securitarian, and migrant actors that produce the transit space, the thesis studies this spatial intervention by focusing on two similar yet distinct cases: Turkey, which has become a key site of externalization since the “EU-Turkey Agreement” of 2016; and Mexico, where a series of externalization policies since 2014 resulted in a significant reshaping of transit migration.

BIOGRAPHY
Timor Landherr is a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. Before joining QMUL, he obtained an M.Sc. in International Relations Research from London School of Economics and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Groningen. The aim of his research, which lies at the intersection of international theory, border and migration studies, and international historical sociology, is to develop new spatial approaches to the study of human and capital mobility in International Relations and International Political Economy. He aims to advance critical strands of international theory that study how the international order is spatially transformed through changing border and migration politics.

PUBLICATIONS
Landherr, Timor and Stacey Tristan. 2023. “Wahlkampf in der Türkei: Ausbeuten und abschieben”, der Freitag. 15/2023. Available at: https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/wahlkampf-in-der-tuerkei-ausbeuten-und-abschieben.
Landherr, Timor 2023. “Border Externalisation, Activism, and Climbing”, in Ph.D. – Pretty Honest Discussions. Podcast available on Spotify.
Landherr, Timor 2021. “Ignoring “Low-Skilled” Migrants and Outsourcing Security: A Critical Assessment of Germany’s Report on the Implementation of the Global Compact on Migration.” Refugee Law Initiative: RLI Blog on Refugee Law and Forced Migration. Available at https://rli.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2021/04/14/ignoring-low-skilled-migrants-and-outsourcing-security-a-critical-assessment-of-germanys-report-on-the-implementation-of-the-global-compact-on-migration/
Landherr, Timor and Unverdorben, Oliver. 2019. “Shoring up European cohesion: The multiplier effect of political engagement.” European Council on Foreign Relations. Available at: https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_shoring_up_european_cohesion_the_multiplier_effect_of_political/

TESS MEGGINSON

Re-Imagining Europe’s Borders: The Mapping of Czechoslovakia, 1915–1920

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

ABSTRACT
This Ph.D. project researches spatial history in 20th century Europe, looking at border changes after the First World War. It also examines the process of map production from the First World War through the Paris Peace Conference, focusing on the creation of the Czechoslovak border with Germany and Austria, as well as the mapmakers from those states who worked to delimit the borders. This dissertation argues that the end of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference marked a paradigm shift in the importance of maps and mapmakers in the creation of European borders, and that maps became essential to the legitimization of mental and physical borders in this period.

BIOGRAPHY
Tess Megginson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spending the year doing archival research in Austria, the Czech Republic, and Germany. She completed her M.A. in European and Russian Affairs at the University of Toronto (2020), where her thesis examined community mapping along the Czechoslovak-Polish border. She completed her B.A. in History (Honours) at McGill University (2018), where her thesis focused on Czech-German relations in the 1930s. Her current research examines the role maps and mapmakers play in creating and legitimizing borders. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post and Canadian Slavonic Papers.

NICHOLAS NYACHEGA

Seeing like Borderlanders”: Border(lands) Controls, Mobilities, Contestations and Everyday Life in North-Eastern Zimbabwe, c.1890s to the Present

University of Minnesota
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

ABSTRACT
This dissertation critically uses oral and family histories, contemporary ethnographic materials, and archival sources to underscore indigenous systems of map-making, territorial controls, and mobilities which defied narrow colonial representations of space, borderlands, and state controls. I adopt a “history from bellow” approach that emphasizes indigenous mobilities, local ideas of space, and power contestations across the Zimbabwe-Mozambique borders. I define and approach borderlands as contested spaces and places of contradictions, to foreground how and why states’ efforts to “maintain law and order” across the unfortified colonial border were meaningfully undermined and tested by borderlanders such as chiefs, farmers, traders, and healers whose daily needs included access to farms, trading centers, and shrines required them to regularly cross the border.

BIOGRAPHY
Nicholas Nyachega is a native of Zimbabwe born and raised in the Honde Valley borderlands. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in African History, a fellow in Development Studies & Social Change at the University of Minnesota and Bucerius Ph.D. Alumnus. In his teaching and researches, he explores critical questions about borders, borderlands, cross-border mobilities, everyday life, state power and contestations across space and time. His doctoral thesis attempts to “see like borderlanders” to explore the complexities of what happens in places where state forms of power and sovereignty compete with or oppose other local systems of indigenous sovereignty and power.

PUBLICATIONS
Nicholas Nyachega and Wesley Mwatwara, “On Renamo ‘War’: Entrepreneurial Synergies and Everyday Life in the Honde Valley Borderlands, c.1980s–2020,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 47:6, 2021, 973-991.
Enocent Msindo and Nicholas Nyachega, “Zimbabwe’s Liberation War and the Everyday in Honde Valley, 1975 to 1979,” South African Historical Journal, 71:1, 2019, 70-93.
Nicholas Nyachega and Joshua Matanzima, ‘“Across the Border, You Are Treated Well, They Care”: Patients and Therapeutic (Im)mobilities in the Honde Valley and Zambezi Borderlands.’ In Pophiwa N., et al (eds.) Lived Experiences of Borderland Communities in Zimbabwe Livelihoods, Conservation, War and Covid-19. (2023). Springer Geography: Springer Cham Press.
Nicholas Nyachega and Kudzai Biri, ‘“Policing Boundaries of the Body”? Spirit-type African Apostolic Churches, and HIV/AIDS in Eastern Zimbabwe;1985-2015.’ In Chitando E., et al (eds.), Religion, and Inequality in Africa. (2023), Bloomsbury Publishing.
Nicholas Nyachega and Vongai O. Sagonda, ‘Changing Livelihoods and Coping Strategies among Ethnic Minorities and the Manyikas in the Honde Valley Borderlands since the 1970s.’ In K. Helliker, P. et al (eds.) Livelihoods of Ethnic Minorities in Rural Zimbabwe. (2022), Springer Geography: Springer Cham Press.
Nicholas Nyachega, Book Review, Catholicism and The Making of Politics in Central Mozambique, 1940–1986. By Eric Morier-Genoud. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. 2019. Pp. ix + 245. Religious Studies Review, Volume 47, Number 1, March 2021.

GABRIELLE ROBINSON-TILLENBURG

Border Crossing: Island Artists Defying US Military Occupation

University of Maryland College Park
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

ABSTRACT
In 2001, the US Navy ceased forty years of weapons testing on Vieques, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico, and shuttered what had been the largest US military base in the
world. Artists protested through creative work and on the front lines during the occupation.
Contemporary artists have continued to produce an imperative record of this experience, its
aftereffects, and the afterlives of the base’s borders. This dissertation comprises a transnational study of islands where similar impacts have been felt and articulated by artists. Photograph, video, and performance-based artworks from Hawai'i, Guam, Cuba, the Philipines, and Okinawa are considered through cross-border analysis, joined together in a greater resounding critique of US occupation’s local and global impacts.

BIOGRAPHY
Gabrielle (Gabi) Tillenburg is a Ph.D. student researching modern and contemporary Caribbean and diasporic art at the University of Maryland. Her interests include contemporary Puerto Rican art, artist activism in anti-imperial movements, and interpretations of time and memory in lens-based art. She holds an M.A. in Art History and Archaeology from University of Maryland and a BFA in Film from the University of Central Florida. Her thesis, Picturing Liminality: Island Bodies of Okinawa and Puerto Rico, examines three video-based artworks commenting on US naval occupation. Her research builds on this comparative study as she works toward her dissertation.

PUBLICATIONS
Tillenburg, Gabrielle. “On and Under U.S. Occupation: Women Artists in Japan and Puerto Rico.” Artlines (Winter 2021): 8–11.
Tillenburg, Gabrielle. “Interview with Artist Eric Rivera Barbeito.” Sequitur 7, no. 2 (2021).

LEON JONAS SCHLÜTER

Visions of the Border: Political Theory and the Displacement of Border Struggles

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

ABSTRACT
Interweaving political theory with historical research, the dissertation project investigates how a particular way of seeing the border became hegemonic within political thought. This is a political vision that identifies borders with the territorial demarcation lines of nation-states, treats them as a necessary fact of social life, and in doing so, brackets the violent histories of border formation. The project traces the implications of such an understanding for political theorizing, both in terms of the questions that are being asked and the kind of answers that are deemed acceptable. It argues that the resulting vision is as much a way of seeing the border as of unseeing it, a ‘form of ignorance’ that contributes to the displacement of border struggles.

BIOGRAPHY
Leon Jonas Schlüter holds a master's degree in philosophy from Freie Universität zu Berlin and is currently completing the “M.A. Research Training Program in Social Sciences” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Previously, he studied philosophy and economics at the Universität Bayreuth and was an affiliate student at University College London. Leon’s work is situated at the intersection of political theory, social philosophy, and critical theory. In his research, he is particularly interested in the historicity of borders and the question how they shape existing social relations. Over the last years, Leon has taught courses on the politics of (in-)equality, civil disobedience, and political theater.

PUBLICATIONS
Schlüter, Leon (forthcoming): “Gegen Grenzen.“ Movements: Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies [review of Gracie Mae Bradley & Luke de Noronha (2022): Against Borders: The Case for Abolition, London].
Schlüter, Leon (2022): “Revealing Invisible Inequalities in Egalitarian Political Theory.” Journal of Global Ethics 18(1), 134–151.
Schlüter, Leon (2021): “Resisting Epistemic Injustices: Beyond Anderson’s ‘Imperative of Integration’.” Las Torres de Lucca: International Journal of Political Philosophy 10(19), 59– 69.

LOUISE THATCHER

Spaces of Bordering along the Shipping Routes between Bremen and Australia across the late 19th and early 20th Centuries

Universität Potsdam
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

ABSTRACT
This dissertation project explores the history of immigration control practices between the turn of the twentieth century and the interwar period. Louise Thatcher examines the techniques that officials used to sort desirable migrants from the undesirable, identify and track individual travellers, detect, and deter clandestine mobility and channel the mobile labour of maritime workers. This project also looks at how these everyday practices were contested by people who continued to cross borders. It follows in the path of work that historicises the modern border regime, tracing its emergence in a global history grounded in colonialism and the construction of racial boundaries.

BIOGRAPHY
Louise Thatcher is a doctoral candidate in the Professorship for Global History at the University of Potsdam. She has a B.A. in History from the University of Sydney and an M.A. Global History from the Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her M.A. thesis, 'Policing the Border in Early White Australia', was awarded the German Association of Australian Studies’ Young Researcher Award in 2020.

PUBLICATIONS
Thatcher, L. (2023). ‘Maritime Workers, Desertion, Racism, and Labour Mobility in Early 20th-Century Australia’, Australian Studies Journal. DOI: 10.35515/zfa/asj.37/2023.02
Thatcher, L. (2022). 'Policing the Border in Early White Australia', KOALAS 15, Migrant Australia: From Botany Bay to Manus Island.

SAMUEL TSEGAI

Mapping Ethiopia: Sovereignty, Territoriality and Nationalism, 1855-1941

Queen's University
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

ABSTRACT
This dissertation project engages with the historical question of how Ethiopia, as a recognizable, bounded, and fixed geo-body, with its discrete ethno-geographic homelands, was cartographically created between the 19th and 20th century. It examines the transition from the conception of Ethiopia as a floating geographic signifier denoting unbounded space to a cartographically girded and relatively ontologically stable geo-body in the crucible of European scramble for Africa and Ethiopia’s increasing articulation to the global capitalist order. This project aims at examining the representational and discursive strategies, mapping tools, and spatial conceptions which facilitated and manifested in this transition.

BIOGRAPHY
Samuel Emaha Tsegai is a doctoral candidate in history at Queen’s University, Canada. He obtained his B.A. degree in History from Eritrea Institute of Technology (2010) and an M.A. in History from Queen’s University, Canada (2018). Between 2012 and 2015, he was also involved in a high school history textbook writing project for the Eritrean Ministry of Education. His research focus is broadly on Ethiopian historical geography and nationalism. He is also interested in Eritrean nationalism and the discourse of decolonization and modernity during the British Military Administration, 1942-1952.