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Staff Profile

Dr Silvia Pasquetti

Senior Lecturer in Sociology

Background


Background 

Before joining Newcastle, I was a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and a Stipendiary Junior Research Fellow (Clare Hall) at the University of Cambridge. I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2017-2018 I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Science) in Princeton.

I am a political sociologist and urban ethnographer working at the intersection of law and society scholarship, urban studies, and citizenship and refugee studies. My work focuses on forced displacement in comparative and global perspective and in connection to histories and structures of colonial control, militarism, and urban marginality.


Roles

Sociology Adviser for Combined Honours Programme (2016-2017).

MA Sociology Degree Programme Director (2020-2023).

Module Leader for the UG Sociology Dissertation (2024-present)

Sociology Co-Lead for (Widening Participation) Partners Programme (2025-Present).


Recent Publications


Book

Silvia Pasquetti. 2026. Refugees Together and Citizens Apart: Control, Emotions, and Politics at the Palestinian Margins. Oxford University Press.


Journal Articles


Degnen Cathrine, Pasquetti Silvia, Barnes Hannah, Marchetti Chiara, Rossi Michele. 2025. "It was Like a Tsunami": Challenges for Refugee Third-Sector Organizations at a Time of Repressive Asylum Policies. Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees, 41(1), 1-19.


Pasquetti Silvia, Jemima Repo and Hala Shoman. 2024. Settler Colonialism and Mortal Dangers: Affective Responses to Covid-19 and the 2021 Israeli Bombings among Young Palestinians in Gaza. International Political Sociology, 18, 3 https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae031.


Pasquetti, Silvia. 2023. "Policing Palestinians: Race, Citizenship, and Indirect Rule" PoLar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review https://polarjournal.org/2023/11/08/policing-palestinians-race-citizenship-and-indirect-rule/.



My publications are available at:


https://newcastle.academia.edu/SilviaPasquetti


and


https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Silvia-Pasquetti

 

Research

Research


I am a political sociologist and urban ethnographer working at the intersection of law and society scholarship, urban marginality, and citizenship and refugee studies. My work focuses on forced displacement in comparative and global perspective and in connection to histories and structures of colonial control, race, militarism, and marginality and engages with Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory and his work with Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad on settler colonialism in dialogue with a range of other theoretical approaches to law and collective emotions, urban marginality and encampment, and differentiated coercive control.


One strand of my work casts a long-term ethnographic lens on the violent denial and dismemberment of Palestinian peoplehood, foregrounding how dispossessed Palestinians experience and seek to resist Israeli settler colonial rule across multiple localities. This work has culminated in my first monograph, Refugees Together and Citizens Apart: Control, Emotions, and Politics at the Palestinian Margins (Oxford University Press, 2026). The book examines affective and political experiences and refusals of Israeli coercive control across two localities: the Palestinian segregated districts of Lyd (renamed Lod, an Israeli city that has been built out of the violent expulsions of its Palestinian residents in 1948), and Jalazone, a refugee camp in the West Bank, whose inhabitants are originally from the Lyd area. Specifically, the book compares the emotional climate of fear, distrust, stigma, and frustration at communal frailty in Lyd's segregated Palestinian districts with the defiant defensive togetherness in Jalazone, examining how these two emotional climates are both collective responses to distinct forms of coercive control and conducive to different forms of political life. The book supplements the comparative lens with a cross-border perspective attentive not only to the historical but also familial, social, and political ties between the two localities. Crossing Israeli borders of coercive control, this book highlights the role of legal status, place, and class in structures, experiences, and refusals of coercive differentiation. Along the way, it illuminates how the violent dismemberment of the Palestinian body politic is reproduced and the collective struggle for liberation articulated at the Palestinian margins.


The book also opens a dialogue between Palestine Studies and Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad's work on settler colonialism in Algeria. I discuss the connection between Palestine Studies and Pierre Bourdieu's and Abdelmalek Sayad's sociology of displacement here: https://youtu.be/kEX9pYujFXY?si=5Z9oKCo_ia4lA7xH&t=885 (invited talk at the Chicago Sociology Workshop for the first edition in English of Bourdieu's and Sayad's Uprooting, 2020).


In addition to my book, I have (co)published on settler colonialism, distributed coercive control, forced displacement, urban militarism, emotions, and political life among Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and segregated poor communities in urban Israel in a number of journals (see e.g. co-authored article in International Political Sociology with Jemima Repo and Hala Shoman, and solo articles in Theory & Society, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Law & Society Review, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research).


Another strand of ongoing research examines forced displacement in Italy, with particular attention to everyday interactions of law, morality, and violence at the urban margins where different segments of impoverished residents interact in their everyday lives. This strand brings global south debates about forced displacement and marginality to bear on issues of legality, justice, solidarity, and hostility in the (peripheries) of the global north. This research has resulted so far in two publications for MERIP (2016), and Qualitative Sociology (2022, with Noemi Casati).


A third strand of work focuses on camps and the politics of encampment in historical, comparative, and contemporary perspectives. This work appears in two co-edited special issues (with Giovanni Picker, for City, 2015, and International Sociology, 2017). I am currently working on a review paper on camps and forced encampment titled Confining People: The Sociology of Camps as invited submission by the Annual Review of Sociology for their 2028 volume. 


A fourth strand of work on forced displacement is participatory and collaborative, and straddles the boundary between academia, practice, and activism, meaningfully complementing the other strands of work, which are mostly driven by ethnography, comparative sociology, and social theory. Specifically, since 2019 I have worked (with Prof Cathrine Degnen) with practitioners (The West End Refugee Service, Newcastle, UK wers.org.uk and the Centre for Migration, Asylum, and International Cooperation, Parma, Italy https://ciaconlus.org/ on multiple nested knowledge-exchange, engagement, and impact projects aimed to think through community-based initiatives (complementary to need-based and rights-based approaches) in the refugee third sector at a time of increasingly hostile policy and public environments. Some of this work has been funded by Newcastle University (Sociology subject area; Social Justice Cluster) and some by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF). The first publication from this project can be found in Refuge (2025). Since May 2026, this work has been extended to two other organisations-Borders None in Croatia and Kulturno Drusto Gmaja in Slovenia-and another university (Parma, via project member, Prof Michela Semprebon) thanks to an ESRC funded Newcastle Impact Acceleration Grant awarded to our project titled  'Community-based protection: Expanding and strengthening a network of refugee third sector organisations across European cities' (£14,940, 2026-2027). The project includes an in-person workshop on community-based protection with academics, practitioners, and community activists, which will be held at the University of Parma in April 2027.


These strands of work on forced displacement have also come together in a co-edited book, a series of public sociology essays, and a review paper. First, I am the co-editor (with Dr Romola Sanyal, LSE Geography) of a book, titled Displacement: Global Conversations on Refuge, published with Manchester University Press (2020). This book draws on cases from different regions of the world to undertake a critical examination of the shifting mechanisms and unequal paths underpinning the global humanitarian management of displacement. It also offers new theoretical tools for studying different structural and experiential dimensions of displacement (in camps, cities, on the move, in everyday relations with citizens, street-level bureaucrats, civil society actors, etc). Reviews of this edited book can be found in Ethnic & Racial Studies (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2022.2045030) and in the LSE Review of Books (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2022/02/23/book-review-displacement-global-conversations-on-refuge-edited-by-silvia-pasquetti-and-romola-sanyal/).Second, I have also published public sociology essays on citizenship, human rights, postcoloniality, and migration in the British Journal of Sociology, and on emotions, dispossession, and urban surveillance among Palestinians in Lyd for Contexts. I have also published a review on paper on refugees and scales of law and justice for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.




Postgraduate Supervision

I would be happy to discuss potential postgraduate supervision with any student interested in working on any of the following topics: citizenship and (legacies of) colonialism; surveillance, policing, and the security state; humanitarianism and refugees; moral economies of justice; emotions and political action; militarism, the state, and the city; urban marginality, the sociology of Palestinians, settler colonialism, law, violence, and moralities of justice, migration and global (de)coloniality.


I have successfully supervised four PhD students to completion:



Ankita Mukherjee (Newcastle University Research Excellence Academy Funding).Exploring the discriminatory practices and social support networks of the Hijra community: A qualitative study of the 'third gender' in Delhi. (co-supervised with Prof Diane Richardson) (2023).

Silvia Maritati (Newcastle University Research Excellence Academy). Asylum, Inequality, and Sense of Place in Peripheral Europe. (Co-supervised with Prof Cate Degnen) (2024).

Pilar Morena d’Alò (NUaCT). When the spiritual becomes political: colonial tensions in Argentinian ‘green wave’ feminist knowledge production. (co-supervised with Prof Diane Richardson and Dr Stephen Seely) (2024).

Gabriella Mwedzi. Forgotten Women: An Intersectional Investigation into Black Christian Responses to Intimate Partner Violence in the UK (co-supervised with Dr Geth Rees) (2025).


I am currently supervising 7 PhD students:


Hala Shoman (ESRC funded). Palestinian Women at the Intersection of Colonial and Patriarchal Violence: Societal Renegotiations of Religion and Tradition in Gaza (post viva). (with Dr Jemima Repo, Politics, and Prof Rachel Pain, Geography).

Emily Upson (ESRC funded). Priorities, Strategies, and Evaluating Efficacy: Expert Insights into Transnational Advocacy Networks for Uyghur Human Rights (post viva). (with Prof Rhona Smith, Law).

Stuti Pradhan (ESRC funded). Sikkimese Women’s Differentiated Citizenship: Postcoloniality, Indigeneity, and Gender in India (writing).(with Dr Jemima Repo, Politics, and Dr Raksha Pande, Geography).

Brightman Makoni (ESRC funded) The Production and Policing on New Categories of Migrants: Zimbabwean migrant families and the UK Health and Care Worker Visa Scheme (3rd year) (with Dr Bethan Harries, Sociology, and Dr Laura Routley, Politics).

Danlei Huang. Returning to Rural China: The Interplay Between Rural Power Structures and Women Returnees' Multidimensional Agency.(2nd year) (with Prof Ruth McAreavey and Dr Jemima Repo).

Farah Qadi (ESRC funded): ​​Humanitarian Aid Misalignment and the Growth of Informal Markets in Gaza: Addressing Economic Settler-Colonialism Amidst War Conditions (first year)(with Dr Jemima Repo and Dr Lewis Turner, Politics).

Ben Bouquet: healthcare, human rights, and international organizations in Palestine (PhD in Law and Public Health, with Prof Rhona Smith, Law).



Teaching

UG Teaching

I am the module leader for SOC2085 Refugees and Displacement: Borders, Camps, and Asylum (2nd year undergraduate sociology module) - running 26-27 (2nd semester).


MA Teaching

I teach on SOC8050 Migration, Mobilities, Inequalities (not in 26-27)


Publications